Brains & Behavior (A Mind to Crime : The Controversial Link Between the Mind and Criminal Behaviour - Ann Moir, David Jessel)

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Product:	A Mind to Crime : The Controversial Link Between the Mind and Criminal Behaviour - Ann Moir, David Jessel
Date:	02/05/01 (136 review reads)
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Advantages: Exciting ideas from a fast-growing field of research.

Disadvantages: Nothing seems definite yet.

You might not know this, but someone has already invented a car that can run practically for ever on a single tank of petrol. In fact, he did it a long time ago. Way back in the ’seventies. But the oil-companies went calling on him with a large suitcase full of money. Or had him murdered and his workshop burnt down. And that was the end of it.

Or so the story goes. It’s a good story too and we’re quite ready to believe it. In our ideal world, we wouldn’t have to fill up with petrol regularly and frequently. In the oil companies’ ideal world, we do. So if anything happened that threatened to change their ideal world into our ideal world, they’d do something about it. In other words, they have a vested interest in the status quo.

Just like lawyers and politicians and the rest of our glittering panoply of criminal justice. They have a vested interest in the status quo and the status quo is that large numbers of people - almost entirely men - are locked up for for committing crimes. Then they are let out, are free for a time, then quite often are locked up again for committing the same crimes again. Like filling up a tank with petrol, it’s inefficient, expensive, and has ugly consequences. Prisons are unpleasant places and do unpleasant things to people’s psyches. Just as petrol does unpleasant things to our environment.

But that’s the status quo and some people benefit from it. Lawyers and politicians and so on. Which is why if they were offered a solution to crime, I don’t think they would take it. In fact, they have already been offered solutions to crime and they have already refused to take them. Tentative solutions, anyway, and certainly new and potentially very fruitful ways of thinking about crime and what causes it.

This book is a look at some of these new ways of thinking. The old ways - or rather, way - was never very fruitful. The old way was based on the idea of
free will: that moral choices take place in a vacuum, metaphysically disconnected from genetics, biology, and environment. That was never an intellectually coherent idea, because there was always one very big piece of evidence against it: the fact, as Jessel and Moir constantly stress, that crime is a mostly male affair. 95% of violent crime is committed by men, for example. How does free will account for that? Maleness is not a choice: it is something you’re born with, or not, as the case may be.

Just as other things underlying crime may be not be choices but things you are born with, or have imposed on you by your environment. It’s obvious, really. I can speak and walk upright. My goldfish can’t. Why not? Because they’re goldfish, which means they don’t have the same bodies as human beings like me. Above all, they don’t have the same brains. What we do is based on what our brains are, so if you want to understand why some of us do certain things the most obvious place to look is their brain. Some people do certain things because their brains are certain things.

Damaged, for example. Brain damage can explain paedophilia. Though some of us don't want it to explain paedophilia, because we enjoy the raw gutflame of righteous indignation. But if paedophilia _is_ abnormal, and the morally indignant are loudest in proclaiming that it is, doesn’t that suggest there is something abnormal about paedophiles? And if paedophiles are abnormal, doesn’t that suggest there is something abnormal about their brains?

The same reasoning applies to other forms of crime, just as it applies, in general, to the male domination of crime. Male brains, on average, are different from female brains, so men, on average, are likelier to behave in certain ways than women are. Violently, for example, or riskily. Men do that because violence and risk don’t mean as much to them as they do to women. The burnt child f
ears the fire, but men don't get burnt as easily, because of the way their brains work.

Jessel and Moir detail some of the ways in which male brains, in general, and criminal brains, in particular, make them less responsive to stimulation and so more eager to seek it out in heightened forms. In fact, they have rather too many ways of explaining the male search for excitement and propensity to commit crime. Is is chronically lower levels of a brain chemical called serotonin or chronically lower levels of blood-sugar, or a mixture of the two? Or are these two aspects of a single condition?

The answers aren’t clear yet, but it does seem clear that to understand human behavior we have to understand the brain and the forces that shape it: our genes and our environment. Crime is about the way humans behave, so to understand crime we have to understand the brain. This book is one of the first popular accounts of the early days of the scientific quest to achieve that. When it is achieved, we are going to have a great deal of power over ourselves and other people, and if you want to help ensure that power is not abused - or at least be ready for it to be abused - you should read books like this.

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