Can our brains dispose us to a life of crime?
Iam currently reading a gripping book by Adrian Raine called, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. In a sense the father of this line of enquiry was also responsible for the death of the subject. Cesare Lombroso, a former Italian Army medic, dissected the brain of a notorious criminal in 1871 and saw — or thought he saw — significant differences in the brain of the brigand than of “normal” people. Lombroso came up with the hypothesis that genetic differences led to differences in brain development, making some people or races more prone to criminality than others. Not too much later the Italian government, under Benito Mussolini, used precisely this hypothesis to target Lombroso’s community — the Jews — among others.
Understandably Lombroso’s hypothesis became suspect, and was dismissed as racist claptrap, but over time the evidence for genetic abnormalities and hereditary traits being linked to some criminal behaviour has only grown. Raine does an admirable job in explaining this in his book, but the deeper point has less to do with ancestry or race, and far more to do with the question of whether our brains determine our criminality. In 1848, a few decades before Lombroso was carving up his criminal’s mind, Phineas Gage, a railway worker, was wounded in an accident: a metal rod blasted through his skull. Miraculously Gage survived, although he lost his left eye. He also lost a part of his brain matter, and subsequently became a very different person. A steady, hard-working man, known to those around him as a sober, shrewd businessman and diligent in his work, transformed into a man who could not pay attention, used the vilest of profanities, became sexually promiscuous and a drunkard. Damage to his brain seemed to have turned a man who was previously a pillar of the community into a psychopath.
Studying brain functions in murderers more than a century later, Raine also discovered dramatically different brain activity between them and a control group, despite controlling for age, race, gender and other such variations. Fortunately for us, but maybe not for science, murderers make up only a tiny proportion of the population, so the sample size for these tests is relatively small. Nevertheless the links between brain functionality — whether due to genetic factors or later damage — seem to be piling up, linked from everything from domestic abuse to psychopathic behaviour. In one particularly striking case, a man suddenly started making sexual advances towards his stepdaughter and displaying other sexually offensive behaviour. Initially he was put in a correctional facility but then he started making sexual advances towards the staff. The day before he was supposed to be jailed he was crippled by an agonising headache. Brain scans revealed a tumour, and when it was removed, his sexually offensive behaviour disappeared. Then some while later it recurred. It was found that the tumour had reappeared, and upon its removal, the behaviour problems also stopped.
Such studies and advances in biological sciences, and the linkages between brain functionality and criminality, throw open two very important questions of criminal responsibility and of appropriate methods to limit criminality. If some criminals are driven by the brain impairment to become anti-social actors it seems unnecessarily cruel to hold them responsible for things that they have limited control over. It would be the equivalent of punishing someone with polio for an inability to run. It would seem that we need to care for criminals in a more compassionate manner than we do now, and also that maybe we need to pay more attention to their medical histories than merely the details of their crime, especially if we do not want the crimes to recur.
But science has not yet gone far enough to help us identify “criminal genes”, or criminal physiology. We cannot predict who will be a criminal merely by reading their brain scans. One of the most interesting brain scans in the book is that of Randy Kraft, a serial killer who murdered dozens of people, and was only caught because he made a driving mistake after having a few beers. The police stopped him, and found that the passenger was actually a corpse. In the trunk of the car was a list of aliases for the victims that Kraft had killed over the years. What is particularly interesting about Kraft’s brain scan is how closely it seems to match the author’s, and unless he has been very successful in covering up his crimes, he is not a serial killer.
Pioneering work in neurobiology is giving us a glimpse of deeply complex phenomenon of which we have, until now, held fairly straightforward ideas. We know those ideas are now wrong, we do not really know which ones are the right ones. It behoves us to be humble, and to keep on searching. And, by the way, did you know that banana trees share 50 percent of our DNA? Who knew? Always thought they looked a little criminal.
If some criminals are driven by the brain impairment to become antisocial actors it seems unnecessarily cruel to hold them
responsible for things that they have limited control over.
Omair Ahmad is a Delhi-based writer, still making up for being a failed science student. His last book was Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys into Bhutan (Aleph, 2013).