Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior

Gail Anderson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000712117
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, Second Edition is fully updated to include recent research, studies, and publications examining the integration of the biological view with mainstream social, psychological, and environmental views in influences in criminality and criminal behavior.

The first edition of the book was written with the belief, grounded in research, that something vital can be discovered when we assess all the factors related to the causes of crime, including biology. Since the first edition published, it has become broadly accepted that biology is certainly a factor in criminal behavior, albeit a singular piece to the puzzle.

Increased collaborations between scientists and criminologists has led to a much stronger understanding of the intricacies of biology's role in behavior. As well, more criminologists have biological backgrounds. As the science involved became more complex, so too did this text.

This second edition considers the more recent and integrated research that is being conducted today to show the interaction between the environment and a person's biology that lead to our behavior. It has even been shown that the environment acts on, and actually changes the functions, of some genes. The book begins with basic scientific principles and advances to introduce the reader to the more in-depth discussions of various biological influencers.

Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, Second Edition is written primarily for social science and law students who wish to understand this exciting area. The book offers a greater understanding of this rapidly growing field so that its lessons can help to inform policy, treatments, rehabilitation and the law.

1

Biology and crime

Introduction

Since prehistory, we have tried to understand why people commit crime. Innumerable explanations have been put forth over time—many ludicrous, some plausible. Medieval “biological” explanations, for example, found criminal character rooted in a system of humors: large-scale influences on behavior brought about by balances and imbalances within specific organs of the body and their secretions. Moral theories of crime as an evil influence have been historically predominant. In about 400 BCE, Plato thought that criminality was caused by an obscurity of thought—the imprisoned human mind was blocked from enlightenment as if it were locked in a cave and thus acted irrationally. In the first century CE, St Paul thought that it was caused by sinfulness, our inability to fulfill the law of God. In the nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso put forward a more modern biological theory, a concept of facial types, or atavisms, by which one could identify the criminal; his findings were supposedly based on science. With misunderstood beliefs in genetics, the eugenics movement began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the atrocities and genocide by Nazi Germany in World War II.

After the horrors of the eugenics movement were fully understood, social scientists turned 180° away from any thought of a biological role in criminal behavior, or indeed in any behavior, and focused solely on social science explanations for crime. As we will show, although the concept of eugenics is appalling, the truth is that it had nothing to do with science or genetics but was rather a racist political ideology. This violent rejection of biological explanations for criminal behavior was extremely unfortunate, as it delayed the opportunity for a much more embracing understanding of criminal behavior. However, the vast amount of legitimate research that has been conducted in this area has reached a stage where it cannot be ignored and has shown that the new field of biosocial research is not only valid but offers tremendous promise for ways in which we may be able to intervene and even prevent crime. Anyone who has ever known a newborn baby knows that babies are not born as blank slates. They already have a strong personality, which may have even made itself felt in the womb. The strong empirical body of research that has been published recently, some of which we will cover in this text, has resulted in the new field of biosocial criminology.¹

Of course, biology does not cause crime, but then neither does social status, psychology, or experience. It is a combination of all the factors of a person and an environment that can lead to that person behaving in a certain manner that could lead to a criminal act. It is unlikely that we will ever understand what “causes” crime, but a more informed consideration, looking at all factors, including a person’s biology, is likely to bring us closer to reliable and more humane answers. We work, therefore, on the principle that in the effort to understand a complex human phenomenon such as crime, all factors must be considered. And in this introductory chapter, we first try some critical thought experiments to clarify this complexity. With luck, these will give rise to a healthy skepticism about research in human behavior and especially about scientific research that purports to explain crime. We next explore how many of the biological bases for particular criminal behaviors are, at least in potential, treatable. This is the promise of biological research into crime. While biology may offer a limited answer to larger, more philosophical questions about crime, the approach explained in this text has some distinct advantages. From this discussion, some further cautions about studying crime in general are explored. For example, we evaluate scientific methods throughout this text, and we need to engage some of the problems that can occur in any scientific research.

This chapter reviews some of the social history from which this approach to crime has arisen. Up until the very recent past, the topics discussed in this text were considered too controversial to discuss in criminology. Even when the first edition of this text was published, the subject matter was still considered contentious. One of the important areas of controversy is, of course, the use of genetics to explain criminality. When social scientists respond negatively to biological explanations, they often assume that they are based on genetics. Until recently, genetic explanations of criminality were much out of favor, because they were not understood and because such misinformation has been used reductively (and dangerously) in the past. They are now often strongly associated with past mistakes, such as the eugenics movements, or with the genocidal regimes of Nazism and Stalinism, in which whole populations were denied human rights based on supposed genetic differences. There are, then, some very good reasons to be cautious of their use. In relation to the approach developed in this book, it is important for the reader to realize that any reduction of the causes of crime to genetics alone can be a serious and dangerous distortion. Through a critical look at the field’s checkered past, we hope in the following chapters to explore its much brighter future.

The question of biology, crime, and the environment

What then is the general place of biology in an explanation of crime? To explore this question, we first consider a less controversial but parallel question about genetics. We could ask, for example, a good biology question: Do our genes govern how we write? One advantage we would expect in taking this “genetics alone” approach is that we should receive a clear and precise answer. This, after all, is what scientific research promises.

Is writing learned environmentally or controlled genetically?

Both common sense and scientific evidence tell us that the way we write is affected by our physical ability—how dexterous we are and how well we can manipulate objects with our fingers. Dexterity could then be determined by genetic makeup, the facility with finger movements and hand-eye coordination we are born with. But without much effort, one can probably find an important qualification. Our ability to write is obviously also governed by non-genetic influences. Conditions in the womb, for example, have an influence on the development of hands and arms and can therefore affect later dexterity and thus later writing skills. Another qualification: we are not born able to write; we have to learn how to write. We write in a particular way because we were taught this way. We incorporate and model the scripts of the people who are significant in our early lives—teachers, older siblings, and parents. It is not too difficult to find an increasing array of other clearly environmental influences. A hand injury in childhood could also affect the way we learn to write, and equally, an injury in adulthood can change the way we write, as we learn to compensate for the injury. Considering this multiplicity of real and potential environmental influences, how much of handwriting can be considered truly genetic in origin? The answer is that not much of it is genetic—it is really almost all a learned behavior.

But we can now take our thought experiment a bit further and ask a question to which the reductive genetic approach might provide a better answer. The ability to write might have evolved with the human species, and perhaps, there is a genetic influence on this level. We might now refine our original question to “What makes us, as a species, capable of writing? What abilities do we have that other species do not? Why, for example, can a dog not write?”

Part of the answer involves degree of intelligence—the relative size, organization, and ability of the brain. For this reason, most dogs probably could not figure it out (border collies may be an exception). In general, we would think that dogs would not have the higher-level skills in abstraction, sensory focus, dexterity, and memory that are required for writing and reading. What else, then, do we (and perhaps chimps) have that allows us to write while dogs cannot? Another part of the puzzle is that we have opposable thumbs and dogs do not; it is difficult to hold a pen (or type) without an opposable thumb, although some birds manage to use sticks to get at insects, and chimps can be trained to use many tools. Moreover, people who have lost hands can write and even paint by using their toes or teeth. In general, however, dogs do not have this ability. Thus, if you go back far enough into any feature or skill involving the body, it does appear to come down to genetics. Genes produce the specific attributes of the physical body that make us capable of writing—that is, a hand with fingers and a thumb, and a relatively capacious and intelligent brain that can instruct that hand to learn how to write.

Is writing then “caused” by genes? The problem is that at this level, the genetic argument produces a form of absolute certainty by what might be termed reductive generalization. Such certainties bother scientists—they are always either untrustworthy or of no real use. Yes, we can strongly and confidently assert that the brain itself is inherited and under genetic control and that opposable thumbs are likewise under genetic control. You have a brain because humans evolved one, and the trait of producing a big brain and opposable thumbs is certainly inherited. Such assertions cannot be really contested. But the problem with them is, again, that even on this more general level, they are reductive of actual behavior. You are born with a brain, but what you do with it is a complex mixture of the brain itself, the inherited part, and the social environment—the most important part. The inherited big brain, the finger dexterity we share with the great apes, and the social environment that trains you (for better or for worse) in the necessary skills of script production and interpretation are all vitally necessary for you to write well, to be understood, and to understand writing by others. Learning how to read and write is a highly complex social and biological matter, as any speech therapist will tell you. Genetics is certainly not the only factor in acquiring this ability.

Thus, if you go back to the evolutionary level, you can relate even writing to genetics as a cause. But you may be able to now see that it is a rather one-sided explanation as far as behavior is concerned. Social development, education, and many other environmental influences are utterly necessary as well. Unfortunately, genetics alone cannot give us the magic explanation we wish, because so much more is involved in any aspect of our functional, social interpretive, painfully learned, and all too human behavior.

Is there more to biology than just genetics?

The argument for purely genetic explanations of behavior, and thus crime, can be qualified in another way. Although genetics is part of biology, biology, as the “science of life,” covers much more physiological territory than genetics. In this text, we certainly consider genetics, but we will also examine a host of other biological explanations, such as hormone levels; the effects of disease, diet, and pollution; neurotransmitters; brain injury; and prenatal problems. Some authors place such material under genetics, but I think such presentations can be confusing. Note again their tendency to reduction. Biology, when it is good science, cannot be reductive.

Resistance to biological explanations

Over the last decades, there has been considerable resistance to even thinking through the issues involved in biological approaches to crime. A behavioral scientist recently stated that for the past 30–40 years, “most criminologists could not even say the word ‘genetics’ without spitting.”^2(p972) Even in 1992, the National Institute of Health in the United States withdrew funding for a conference on crime and genetics, citing that a genes-crime link “stood for racism and eugenics.”^{2 (p972)} In many cases, social scientists were afraid even to conceive of biological causes for crime.

As mentioned in the preface, Wright and Miller showed in “Taboo until Today”³ that even the highly educated boycotted the possibility of considering genetic and biological explanations. According to the article, this reaction comes from the idea’s association with the vicious prejudices of the past, including the horrors of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and the genocides of World War II. However, the fact that an idea has been abused and misused does not mean that it should be forgotten or that it is wrong. It is vitally important to realize that although these atrocities were horrific, they were not based on science. They were based on the prejudices and psychopathic policies of people in power who decided to misquote science to an uneducated public to fulfill their own immoral agendas. There is the danger of repeating the prejudices of the past if we do not understand the truth of the science. It was the public’s ignorance of the true facts that allowed such people to use these misrepresentations as weapons.

Another reason for the resistance is that some also think that a biological explanation means there is no hope for treatment. Some fear, for instance, that such an approach may lead politicians to make laws that require incarceration of people with a biological predisposition for antisocial behavior—they must be locked away because they can never “get better.” This view is, again far from the truth and underscores the weakness of this kind of criticism. The biological view actually offers much more hope for those afflicted with these predispositions than social explanations. For example, as a society, we now seem to accept that terrible abuse during childhood could predispose a child toward criminality in later life. But this explanation offers no cure; we can never take away that abuse. We can try to ameliorate it, we can try t...