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239 10 A Criminology for the 21st Century No one has ever been able to answer the questions about criminals’ brains raised by William Freeman’s massacre of the Van Nest family. Might Freeman’s head injury have caused him to kill the Van Nests? Or was he a calculating, cold-blooded killer who for some unfathomable reason decided to wipe out a family he hardly knew? How can we distinguish between mental disorder and evil intent—and should we even try? What is the best relation of medicine and related sciences to law? (In Freeman’s day, those specialities were phrenology and psychiatry; today, they include psychiatry, neurology, and genetics.) Similar questions arose again in the Andrea Yates case, in which the first jury found her guilty of deliberately drowning her children in a bathtub, but the second (convened not because of doubts about Yates’s condition but because of false testimony by a prosecution witness) found her not guilty due to a biological condition—postpartum psychosis. Do we need to rethink traditional dualisms (mind versus body, free will versus determinism) in light of the new biosocial reasoning and the current view that it is impossible to clearly distinguish between mind and body? The debates over such issues are really controversies about how we as a social group or “thought community”1 want to think about the relationship of bodies to behavior, biology to crime. Today as in William Freeman’s time, debates over specific cases involving criminal biology are inflamed by strains in the broader society, in our case, agitation about human cloning and stem-cell research; worries about the wisdom of transgenic foods and so-called test-tube babies; and alarm about proposals to create “posthumans”—genetically engineered men and women, and people who are part machine. Once again, there is widespread uneasiness about the implications of new sciences, together with broadbased uncertainty about how much weight to give scientific opinion in legal matters. Reflecting this lack of social consensus about the meanings of scientific discoveries is the plethora of attempts in recent years to raise 240 A Criminology for the 21st Century new biological legal defenses: sleepwalking defenses; premenstrual tension defenses and those based on postpartum psychosis; mental retardation defenses; defendants arguing that they came from a family with a history of violence, as in the Hans Brunner study;2 and, increasingly, defenses based on genetic abnormalities and MAOA deficiencies.3 Our culture of biology, with its daily avalanche of news on scientific discoveries, generates an uneasiness about the causes of crime not unlike that which erupted in the mid–19th century when the Van Nest killings became a lightning rod for tensions between older and newer ways of thinking about crime and biology. In the years ahead, biological explanations are likely to play an increasingly prominent role in efforts to understand criminal behavior. Just as, according to predictions, the 21st century will be “the century of biology,” so too, on a more specific scale, is it likely to be the century of biocriminology. On the basis of what this book has found about earlier biological theories, this chapter speculates about the development of biocriminology in the years ahead and ways it will come to relate to sociological explanations of crime. It asks whether there have been patterns or trends in the evolution of biological theories over time and whether today’s biological explanations differ fundamentally from those of the past or are basically more of the same. It also asks whether today’s explanations have the same potential for misuse as those of past and, if so, how we can guard against such tragedies. In what follows, I first trace trends in the development of biological theories of crime over time and then compare the theories of the past to those of the present. I go on to argue that today the danger for misuse lies not with the scientists who are investigating biological causes of crime but rather with simplistic or politically manipulative understandings of their work. To avoid the misappropriation of biocriminology for political ends, as happened during the period of eugenic criminology in the United States and Hitler’s reign in Germany, we need to learn how to question science intelligently and acknowledge our own ignorance. Trends in Biocriminology Over time, biological theories of crime have evolved over six broad trajectories. First, they have developed in terms of their theoretical scope. Moral insanity theory addressed just one form of offending—that which...

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