by Adrian Raine
Consider Adolf Hitler.74 Hitler, as we discussed, was by anyone’s standards a flawed character—but he was also a human being and he had the right to live. Yet would you or Chakrabarti not have killed Hitler in 1933 to save the lives of 6 million Jews and 60 million German, British, Russian, American, and other international civilians and soldiers?
Imagine yourself standing beside Hitler on March 23, 1933, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. He is giving his speech just before the Enabling Act, the law that would make him a dictator with absolute power. He talks about the “decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life.”75 You have a gun in your pocket. You can predict the future and you know for certain you will save 66 million lives if you put the gun to the back of his head near his right ear—as Kip did with his father—and shoot him. No harm would come to you, and the world would be a better place. Would you kill Hitler?
Think it through. Sixty-six million lives and countless suffering to many millions more. Dreadful though the dilemma may be, I think that is the particular trigger I would be prepared to pull. Is doing that really living like an animal rather than a civilized human being? Is there not a huge cost to pay in not taking this particular life, even if it comes with the huge moral cost of murder?
And yet once we take that step, where will this journey lead us? Let me walk you through the valley of darkness and into the barren desert of just deserts. The question comes down to where exactly in the shifting sands of sensible reasoning you are willing to judiciously draw the line that delineates the protection of society on one side and the invasion of civil liberties on the other. The overall risks weighed against the overall benefits. The difference between right and wrong—between life and death. Between acceptance of the neurocriminological knowledge we are rapidly gaining—and the social concerns we all have over equity, ethics, and liberty.
Where exactly on that sliding scale of violence prediction will you be prepared to act? There will never be perfect prediction, not the 100 percent in Paxman’s scenario. But what if it was 90 percent? Or 80 percent? Would you enact LOMBROSO, or something like it, at 79 percent? I know that we are all going to draw different lines. Can we agree on a consensus—the average of all the lines we have drawn?
You may be unwilling to draw any line. You may feel as ethically outraged as Shami Chakrabarti was about where neurobiological research on violence may be taking us. But if the idea of programs like LOMBROSO and NCSP give you pause, consider this: they at least give offenders a chance for deliverance. Criminals would not be stripped of the basic human rights that we deny them today. Under lombroso they could vote, whereas those with criminal convictions cannot vote in the United States and many other countries. They would have conjugal visits. Most prisoners today do not.
Do you realize that we currently practice passive eugenics on our prisoners in forty-four out of the fifty United States? Male prisoners are not allowed to send their sperm out. Female prisoners are not allowed to send their eggs out or receive sperm. If you are serving life without the possibility of parole, your genes will not reproduce. You are a loser in the evolutionary game of reproduction. That line was drawn in the judicial sand long ago.
This glaring fact is extraordinarily hush-hush. Have you ever thought about it yourself? When I raised this issue with some of my criminology colleagues, their response was that it had not crossed their minds. When I spoke to over 200 correctional staff in Trenton, New Jersey, in 2009, they admitted they had never thought about it. When I have raised this issue on several occasions in academic talks and lectures, it is followed by universal silence.
There is irony here. Genetic researchers in the 1990s were accused of fostering a eugenic “final solution” to stopping crime. That accusation was demonstrably false. But let’s be sure about one thing: our current policy of what I call “passive eugenics” on criminals did not emerge from genetic or biological research. It was a direct product of social policy. Although some well-intentioned people believe that genetic research on crime should be stopped because it could lead to eugenics, there has been no similar call to halt social-science or public-policy research on crime. And yet through such policy we are effectively reducing the genetic fitness of the most serious offenders and limiting their genetic material in future gene pools.
Social scientists may have decried Lombroso’s nineteenth-century thinking in branding criminals as evolutionary throwbacks, but in many ways our current thinking and our passive-eugenics policy are still stuck in the nineteenth century. Prisoners are today viewed as little more than Lombrosian subhuman savages who are not fit to reproduce. We practice passive eugenics, don’t we? They shoot horses, don’t they?
Consider the counterpoint. Losing the right to have children is just part and parcel of committing crime. Prisoners lose their freedom. They lose their right to vote. So why not the right to give life, especially for those who have taken life already? Retribution and deterrence are the rules of the legal game we play with prisoners, and disenfranchisement and passive eugenics are most regrettably the costs that those dealt losing hands in life simply have to pay. And yet … I was always brought up to believe that eugenics was a bad thing.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS—ENDING UP AN OSTRICH
Kip Kinkel can’t have kids. Not with 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole. It’s ironic that the logic of neurocriminology asks us to cut offenders like Kip some slack, to assist in their defense, not to punish them so harshly because reasons beyond their control constrained their free will. It’s ironic because biological researchers on crime have in the past been accused of having the worst intentions for criminal offenders. Have we gone wrong somewhere, and do we need to change our perspective? If we compare some salutary events from the recent past with where we stand today, I think a shift has already occurred in our thinking. We are on the cusp of crossing into new territory.
Wouter Buikhuisen was a criminologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands in the 1970s and ’80s who believed that there was a psychophysiological basis to crime. That perspective resulted in his being hounded like a wild animal and torn to pieces in the Dutch popular press.76 His position was debated in parliament, and he ultimately had to resign his position as chair of the criminology department at Leiden in 1988. It was intolerable at that time to think of crime and criminality being anything other than a social construction caused exclusively by social forces. As a young scholar, I visited Wouter at Leiden in 1987. We had met the previous year in Italy—he wanted to bring me on board in a faculty position at Leiden. Instead I went to Los Angeles, where I hoped the academic atmosphere would be more liberal. But was it?
In 1994 I presented my research findings from Denmark at the annual meeting in San Francisco of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I showed that a combination of birth complications interacted with early maternal rejection in predisposing babies to be violent offenders eighteen years later.77 An article in Science in March that year published a figure illustrating my main findings under the headline war of words continues in violence research.78 It reported my own hope that this new biosocial research could lead to “feasible, practical, and benign ways” of preventing violence. Nevertheless, as Science reported, it was subjected to “a unified and outspoken assault” by other scientists at the meeting, who characterized my findings as “racist and ideologically motivated.”79 My sample was all white, so targeting minorities was not the issue. Instead, the findings suggested that biology worked in concert with social influences—and that was intolerable. Twelve years earlier, in 1982, I had to take a chapter on biosocial influences out of my thesis at the insistence of the external examiner in order to obtain my PhD—even though I had published that work two years earlier in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.80
Twenty years has seen an enormous change in the political landscape of an anatomy of violence. Back in 1994, suggesting an interaction between biological and social factors in predisposing in
dividuals to violence was anathema. Today it is totally passé. Of course such biosocial interactions occur, what’s all the fuss about? In the Netherlands, Wouter Buikhuisen has now been exonerated and given an apology for his persecution,81 and in my experience the Netherlands today has more interest in neurocriminology than any country outside of North America.
Yet the very beginning sentence of that article in Science on violence still rings like a gunshot in my ears:
There are few certainties in life, but here’s one: The uproar surrounding attempts to find biological causes for social problems will continue.82
Will the emerging science of neurocriminology and the double-edged sword that it wields continue to remain bogged down in a minefield of unproductive diatribes? One of the continuing problems is that this research field borders on the politically incorrect. The left doesn’t like it, and the right doesn’t like it either. Liberals and center-left parties fear that the research will be used to stigmatize individuals and take attention away from social problems, the true causes of crime. Conservatives and the center-right are concerned that it will be used to let offenders off the hook and take away responsibility and retribution. There is no question that neurocriminology is a difficult terrain to tread, and some would wish it did not exist at all. Are we certain that the uproar will continue—or is the tide turning?
Critics will further contend that neurocriminology raises the ominous specter of violence being reducible to a physical neural cause, the erosion of the concepts of individual accountability and free will, an abandonment of social injustice as an explanation of crime, and the consequent derailment of social intervention programs for underserved populations. Attacking the law’s freedom-of-will assumption with a deterministic-sounding neurobiological excuse could lead to a “throw away the key” solution because we feel biology cannot be changed. Would it be the start of a slippery slope toward the dissolution of responsibility, an increase in unbridled violent offending, and the implosion of civilization, as Shami Chakrabarti feared?
That ever-feared slippery slope. It’s a common refrain surrounding the moral implications of my work. If we take these steps, what quagmire do they slide us into? Far too often the slippery slope argument is presented at the end of a discussion. Well, there’s a slippery slope, so let’s play it safe and tread no further. That’s a cop-out, and when it comes to the active suppression of new knowledge or the ignorance of silence, it generally stems from the desire of certain groups to maintain the status quo. It turns out that most slopes aren’t so slippery after all if we care to confront our fears and cautiously weigh the risks and benefits of action. There is firm ground underfoot and ample opportunities up and down that slope to choose where we stand—if we have the courage to do so.
Neurocriminology is now providing the foundations upon which to not just dissect the future Hannibal Lecters and Donta Pages, but to potentially prevent their very occurrence in the first place—if we act early. In the wake of the Newtown shootings, many officials and citizens were quick to point not only to guns as the culprit but to our general lack of mental health services. Can we do more for those all too often underserved children like Donta Page and prevent future disasters? After all, what’s so heinous about investing resources in better pre- and postnatal nutrition and care for the underserved, better elementary school nutrition, reducing lead exposure, implementing education on parenting skills, and identifying children with serious behavior problems for benign interventions? Investing resources—costly though it may be—in the next generation of adolescents at risk for violence is not just a place on that slope where I am prepared to stand, but it’s where I hope you’ll stand with me.
Most positive societal advances somehow involve a so-called slippery slope. Can we not find ways to collectively and humanely move forward to reduce violence? Neurocriminology and a more profound understanding of the early biological causes of violence can help us take a more empathic, understanding, and merciful approach not just to the victims of violence but also to the prisoners themselves. In that process, would not the standing of all of us in an allegedly civilized society be raised?
As I sit writing here in a room in Churchill College, Cambridge, reflecting on our outlook on prisoners, my mind inevitably turns to Winston Churchill, who himself had been a prisoner during the Boer War. More than a hundred years ago, Churchill, as home secretary, stood up in the House of Commons and gave his perspective on how we should treat criminals:
The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even those of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man—these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.83
That was more than a century ago, and yet today how calm and dispassionate have the most civilized countries in the world become on this issue? Are we tirelessly pursuing curative and regenerative processes for the cancer of crime? Do we genuinely desire rehabilitation? Or does our mood and temper move us in anger to the costly coinage of retribution that we saw served out to Kip Kinkel, and societal protection above all cost? How would Churchill view us today if he could see where we currently stand in our treatment of prisoners?
We look back 200 years and are aghast at an age when mentally ill patients were kept locked in fetters and chains, and treated little better than animals because of their unacceptable behavior. In a society that was in its time at the pinnacle of world knowledge, such treatment of patients seemed totally appropriate. It was a radical and revolutionary approach for the physician Philippe Pinel to free mentally ill patients from their shackles in Paris in 1793 and place them under more humane conditions. Today the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill seems unconscionable to us. The critical question for us to consider is whether less than a hundred years from now, a much more advanced society than the one we live in will look back aghast at our current conceptualization of violence and our concomitant incarceration and execution of prisoners with the same incredulity with which today we look back at the earlier treatment of mental patients. They may well wonder how society could have countenanced such practices and overlooked the glittering gems—small though they may be—in each and every offender who had the potential to contribute positively to society.
In a wider context, others concur with Churchill’s early vision of the potential for living virtue in our society. As Steven Pinker eloquently outlined in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, our society is moving us to be more empathic, better able to control our impulses, and to reason rather than react. The result, he argues, is that over the course of history, despite periodic swings, violence has slowly declined.84 The history of the world has also shown that as society becomes more ennobled and sophisticated, physical and mental disabilities such as epilepsy, psychosis, mental deficiency, and alcoholism cease to be viewed in a moral or theological context and become perceived more in the humanitarian context of treatment.85 Just as mental disorders were once viewed as a product of evil forces, will the evil behavior of violent offenders eventually be reformulated as treatable clinical disorders? Society may deny this perspective in the short term, but I believe that a future generation with a calmer and more dispassionate perspective will indeed take this conceptual leap.
Extreme views certainly require due caution, but we must not forget that extreme views can be appropriate, and that moderate views can be erroneous. During the witchcraft hunts of the Reformat
ion era in Europe, a moderate view would have been to wake up one morning and decide not to burn too many witches that day. An extreme view would have been to wake up and decide not to burn any witches. The notion of recidivistic violence as a clinical disorder may currently seem ludicrous to you. We must, however, face the possibility that if we close the door to even considering this perspective, we open the gates to tragedy—that breakthrough advances in remediation and treatment of crime will be foreclosed or hopelessly stalled, and future lives will be lost. Some think the issues are too hot to handle, or, as one leading criminologist in good faith once confided to me, “No good can ever come of genetic research on violence.” We must indeed be ever mindful of how neurobiological research findings are interpreted, as such research can be misused. Yet if we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to consider new approaches for a better society, are we not all diminished by our blindness?
We live today in the most scientific and intellectually advanced society in the history of the world. We aspire for heavenly knowledge and have formulated firm convictions that we hold to be true. History has shown, though, that societies at different stages in history with a similar thirst for science have made grievous misjudgments under the banner of absolute knowledge. We have to cure ourselves of that irritating itch for absolute knowledge and certainty. I must consider the possibility that I err in creating a bridge between crime and cancer. Violence may not be a clinical disorder. I do not have the answers on some issues; I am not even sure where I stand on others. Some of my scientific views are tinged with personal perspectives, and like all scientists I stand on the edge of error in my empirical research. In the same spirit of humility, I hope that in your own mind and heart you can at least consider this new zeitgeist.