Scans of a normal brain, left, beside that of murderer Antonio Bustamante, who was spared the death penalty after a jury was shown these pictures. Photograph: Public domain
Posted on 05/12/2013 12:27:26 PM PDT by null and void
Scans of a normal brain, left, beside that of murderer Antonio Bustamante, who was spared the death penalty after a jury was shown these pictures. Photograph: Public domain
Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US.
In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise ... was to doom yourself to an absence of funding.
Raine cites two very recent brain-imaging studies to back this up. One is a study in New Mexico in which prisoners are scanned on release. "What they are discovering is that if the functioning of the anterior cingulate, part of the limbic system, is lower than normal before release, they are twice as likely to be reconvicted in the next three years. And that marker is more accurate a guide than all other social factors," Raine says. A second study apparently shows if a released prisoner has a significantly smaller volume in the amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain crucial for processing memory and emotion, he or she is three times more likely to reoffend. "Now, this is only two studies, but what they are beginning to show is proof of concept, that if we added neurological factors into the equation we could do a better job at predicting future behaviour."
It is perhaps not too wildly far-fetched to imagine that such scans will one day be as routine as immunisation programmes; the bigger question then will be how we begin to react to the results. Raine rather likes the idea of public health programmes as crime prevention: "The teenage brain is still very malleable.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
(3300+ word article excerpted to less than 300 words)...
“At this point, what difference would it make!?!”
For the current crop? None whatsoever.
But I bet we could use their craven greed, lust for unchallenged power and fear of competition to get them to pass a law requiring it for newcomers!
liberals are all killers at heart
The techs would keep re-running the scans, thinking the equipment was malfunctioning because they couldn't identify the image of any brain at all!
I wonder what the scan of a brain of a person that scoffs “old news” off as an issue not worthy of contemporary consideration looks like, compared to one that does not...
Seriously, if as has been posited until the advent of modern materialism, humanity is a union of matter and spirit, then the honest investigator must ask to what extent this is an artifact of what spirit chose to do and to what extent this is an artifact of pre-extant biology. And it opens a lot of Pandora’s boxes: for example, if a mental patient has his/her brain scanned and they see something like this, will that mean the patient will be committed long term as a likely danger to society?
In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behavior, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines. …And of course the Manchester Guardian goes on to try to justify it. Not only are they using “neuroscience” to get criminals off, but they will use it in the future to persecute groups of people based on their genetics due to a supposed predisposition to crime rather than anything to do with the family and the breakdown thereof.
I don’t care what their past is like or if they have brain damage justice still demands that they die.
The fact that they are somatically predisposed to murder simply reinforces the judgment that they must never again be free in society. The only way to ensure that they never again are a threat to society is to put them to death.
To permit them to live under a life sentence leaves the possibility that someday legislation or a judge will free them from captivity and they will again be able to prey on the inocent.
It’s a risk to go off half cocked with these studies. It would be good to do longitudinal studies, following people through changes in their lives. What would a low down gangster’s salvational encounter with God, mirrored in a life that actually does play out from that point as sanctified, look like in the brain scan, or conversely what would it look like in the case of a “decent” person whose conduct later “goes south”?
1931. The deficiencies in the exact areas of the brain identified as correlated with murderous crime. In 1931!
Watch what road you go down there, because “preventive execution” as your linchpin rationale could be extended to those who some supposed pundit has deemed likely to murder in the future even if not now. Punishment that is not “deserved” is immoral, period.
At which point there weren’t any scans, so that has virtually nothing to do with scans.
Mine or theirs?
Theirs, I would presume because they have an agenda.
Mine because I simply hacked out vast blocks of text to fit the copyright requirements, I have no compelling need to mask their agenda, nor was I willing to devote a couple hours of painstaking editing to suit your sensibilities.
Please do feel free to edit and re-post the article with the 300 words that please you.
I'll be more than happy to ask the ModSquad to pull my post to allow room for your clearly superior wordsmithing.
But but but but that would be like eliminating wolverines from kindergartens, just because they are wolverines!
WOW!
Excellent point! Is this deficit/difference subject to actual measurable change?
If he comes into your home here in Texas, you can examine it on the floor, walls and ceiling.
You are 100% correct about how wrong it would be to use this science for “preventive execution” of anyone, who has not actually yet committed a crime. OTOH, it would also be 100% wrong to let murderers off easy, on the basis that their brain is defective.
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