Neurocriminology - do we really choose to be criminals if we don't have free will?
Do we choose to be a criminal or is it a brain disorder?
The justification for prisons, for our criminal justice system as we know it, is the idea that people make a choice to be criminals and that there is free will. Neurocriminology is a new more scientific view of what crime is and we have yet to see it's impact.
Neurocriminology is an emerging sub-discipline of biocriminology and criminology that applies brain imaging techniques and principles from neuroscience to understand, predict, and prevent crime.
In a sample of psychopathic subjects drawn from a temporary job agency, 52% of psychopaths confessed to having attacked a stranger to the point of bruising or drawing blood from the stranger, 42% admitted to having raped at least one person, and 38% said that they had fired a gun at another person (1). Psychopathy, also known as antisocial personality disorder (APD), is of public interest because alarming statistics like these indicate that psychopaths pose a great risk to the population at large (1-4).
Crime in many cases is due to poor judgment. Judgment if a person has understanding of the consequences (laws) and an ability to think before acting (self control), can be enough to allow an individual to adopt a risk reduction strategy. In other words, not being a criminal is a risk reduction strategy to avoid the negative consequences associated with being a criminal.
Due to neuroscience we now have the data to analyze for understanding crime. Psychopaths have been studied and it is now a scientific fact that the brains of psychopaths is different from the brains of neurotypicals. Yet the criminal justice system does not recognize any differences in brain type as far as I know, or in intellectual capability. In sentencing should neuroscience play a role for determining how long of a prison sentence a criminal should get or what kind of prison they should be sent to? Do neuroltypicals belong in prison at all? At what point does our conformity obsessed society begin promoting neuroconformity?
The rest of us need to be protected from them somehow. I've written on my blog about the effects of being a krime survivor and it is devastating. At the same time punishment without treatment is inhumane.
artificial intelligence will tell us in the next decade whats the deal with those people thanks to a more profound deeper analysis of the data that humans just cant analyse that well
That will be interesting.
This issue is incredibly complicated from both a philosophical, scientific, and political perspective. No easy answers can be given.
Personally I think that the concept of free will is still compatible with the idea of determinism. Typically, what we mean by "free will" is just the human actions that are largely controlled by conscious brain mechanisms as opposed to automatic or unconscious brain mechanisms.
I agree with your opinion @Rachelsmantra
Interesting article.
I don't think that prison is a good solution at all. Putting a psychopath into prison won't help him. There need to be a better system as prison. yeah I know there are people who are dangerous and needed to be watched or better cured.
Maybe personal therapy should be used before sending someone to prison. A smarter person than me has to develop a better system :)
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In my view, determinism or not of criminal behaviour mostly poses a problem for the retributive view of justice, which is already very flawed.
Imagine there was a cure for psychopathy, and it was just a matter of taking a pill. Imagine then that we discover someone is a psychopath after he/she commits a crime.
The retributive view of justice would still want this person punished to the full extent, because "they deserve it". But from the point of view of making society safer, or for rehabilitating the criminal, it would make no sense to punish the offendor severely when we can remove the root cause of their criminality. There might be some argument for punishment as a deterrent, but that would be reduced as well by the reduced population of undiscovered/uncured psychopaths.
Right now we don't have a cure for psychopathy. We also know that psychopaths while rare cause an extremely disproportionate amount of crime in our society. They are also a bad influence on their non-psychopathic peers. We should focus on minimizing the damage that psychopaths can cause in our society, without unduly punishing them simply to make us feel better when "they deserve it".
Society as a whole may need to mature in its dealings with psychopaths. Some live out their lives without causing much more harm than neurotypicals do. We may need to be better able to identify and know a psychopath when we see one, to make ourselves less susceptible to manipulation, so they are disempowered from causing harm in a non-violent way. But we may still need methods to keep the ones who can't refrain from violence away from society (including neurotypicals in jail).
nice info, brain is the most important organ, great share. thank you.
I've also had similar thoughts on if psychopaths are to be judged. It's so hard to get inside their head for common people because psychopaths have zero empathy for others and that's a real challenge to understand for people who do feel empathy.