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ESSAY
Tony Blair's "tough on the causes of crime" and David
Cameron's "hug a hoodie" speeches reflect the dominant sociological
model of crime. But research into the "criminal personality" suggests
some people from troubled backgrounds are far more likely to offend than
others. Policymakers are taking an interest
Lives of Crime
For most of the past century, analysis of the origins
of crime has been dominated by sociological models. When Tony Blair
declared in 1992 that his party would be "tough on the causes of crime,"
his audience presumed that he meant that Labour would try to eliminate
crime-generating social ills such as poor housing, unemployment and
inadequate schools. Discussion of the possible roots of offending and
antisocial behaviour within individuals rarely formed part of elite
public discourse. Punishment, the courts held, should be regulated by
the severity of the crime, not the criminal's propensity to commit
further offences.
One of the few challenges to this orthodoxy was made
in the 1960s by Hans J Eysenck, for many years a professor at the
Institute of Psychiatry. Eysenck believed that criminals' personalities
could be rigidly categorised and that most of their behaviour was
inherited. But his work on crime was attacked by mainstream sociological
criminologists and had little influence on policy. Indeed, for most
criminologists the concept of a personality more likely to commit crime
was abhorrent.
The resistance to Eysenck was especially fierce
because he was writing during the vogue for "radical criminology," when
crime was seen as a social construct and the "labelling" of deviants an
aspect of social control. Thirty years later, intellectual fashion has
shifted beyond recognition, with, for example, a heavy new emphasis on
the experiences of victims of crime. Nevertheless, investigation of the
factors that put an individual at high risk of engaging in criminal and
antisocial behaviour remains controversial, and most criminologists
continue to steer well clear of it.
Some consideration of the risk profile of individuals
has, in fact, long been part of penal policy, especially in assessing
prisoners for parole. But its scope is increasing. The 2003 Criminal
Justice Act introduced "indefinite public protection" sentences for
convicts judged at high risk of reoffending, and its provisions have
been widely used: by the end of June 2006, a year after the relevant
provisions of the act came into force, more than 1,000 people had
received the indefinite sentence.
The act, and the new emphasis on risk assessment in
general, entail a big shift from the principle that has governed
sentencing in the past—that of punishment tailored to fit the crime, of
proportionate "just deserts." Although it has been subjected to little
public debate, this new approach requires penal decision-makers—other
than those dealing with murder—to take a radical step: to assume some of
the characteristics of the insurance actuary, and to base the length of
incarceration on future probabilities. At the same time, the act
contains an analysis of offending that departs significantly from
sociological models. Under its terms, many of those judged to pose a
high risk will have been assessed by forensic psychologists or
psychiatrists, on the grounds that they exhibit a "dangerous severe
personality disorder," or DSPD—a disorder that makes them likely to
reoffend.
It is unfortunate that the term DSPD does not match
any accepted clinical definition. Some of those who have already been so
described are psychopaths—callous, emotionally affectless, careless of
the damage their crimes cause to their victims. Others, however, have
been diagnosed with conditions including borderline personality disorder
and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as the much more common
antisocial personality disorder. Nevertheless, the approach that the
2003 act represents poses important questions to which sociological
theories of crime have no answers.
Why do some people from deprived or abusive
backgrounds become violent criminals, while others, whose upbringing
appears to have been equally disadvantageous, go on to lead productive,
law-abiding lives? Might there be ways to spot high-risk individuals
before they commit serious offences, perhaps even in childhood? And are
there interventions that might modify children's behaviour over the long
term, diverting the course of those at high risk before they reach
adulthood?
The focus on future risk requires a means to
differentiate between individuals from similar environments. It places
the offender, not the crime, at the centre of the penal decision-making
universe, and asks those who make such sentencing decisions to base them
on clinical assessments of the defendant's personality and its
associated disorders. It hands great power over individuals' future to a
group unused to wielding it—forensic psychologists and psychiatrists,
and academic researchers in this field.
Even those most wedded to a sociological model of
offending accept that a relatively small proportion of those convicted
of criminal offences account for a very large proportion of total crime.
David Farrington's study of every male born in Britain in 1956 found
that as many as one third had been convicted of at least one non-traffic
offence by the age of 30. But he and his colleagues also discovered that
as few as 5 per cent were responsible for at least half of all known
crime committed by the 1956 cohort. Other research suggests a group this
small commits more than 70 per cent of all recorded offences, and more
than 70 per cent of violent ones.
In a paper published in 1993, Terrie Moffitt, now at
the Institute of Psychiatry, suggested that people convicted of crimes
fall into two very different groups: those for whom offending is limited
to adolescence, and those whose antisocial behaviour begins much earlier
and then persists into middle age and beyond. The age of peak offending,
Moffitt pointed out, is 17, and the majority of active criminals are
teenagers. By their early twenties, however, the number of active
offenders decreases by more than 50 per cent, and by 28, about 85 per
cent of former offenders will have stopped committing crimes.
Moffitt cited several studies to propose that there is
"a very small group of males who display high rates of antisocial
behaviour across time." The same 5 per cent of boys first appear on the
criminological radar screen in early childhood—being prone to aggression
and violence, disobedience, recklessness, lying and theft. Even at
primary school, they are likely to face exclusion and other sanctions.
In adolescence, they are the youths who commit the more serious and
violent crimes, and in adulthood they do not, like most of their peers,
cease such behaviour. "The nomenclature may change," Moffitt wrote, "but
the faces remain the same as they drift through successive systems aimed
at curbing their deviance: schools, juvenile justice programmes,
psychiatric treatment centres and prisons." An age of first arrest
between seven and 11 is among the most reliable predictors of persistent
adult offending.
The causes of "life-course persistent antisocial
behaviour" are, wrote Moffitt, likely to lie "early in life, in factors
that are present before or soon after birth." Behind the condition, she
suggested, was an interactive process between some kind of
neuropsychological condition and an individual's environment: "In a
nurturing environment, toddlers' problems are often corrected. However,
in disadvantaged homes, schools, and neighbourhoods, the responses are
more likely to exacerbate than amend… thus over the years, an antisocial
personality is slowly and insidiously constructed." Its emergence, she
implied, was likely to be the consequence of complex interactions
between nature and nurture, of genes and their environment. Among those
whose antisocial behaviour was limited to adolescence, its origins were
more restricted, arising from teenagers' vulnerability to peer pressure,
their search for popularity and the frustrating quest for the resources
and privileges available to adults which they were denied.
Later research in several countries has supported
Moffitt's classification. Some of the most important work has come in a
series of papers by Moffitt herself and her colleagues, drawn from the
Dunedin multidisciplinary health and development study. This looked at a
group of over 1,000 men and women born in New Zealand between April 1972
and March 1973, who have been assessed regularly ever since.
The Dunedin study reveals that boys and men who engage
in life-course persistent antisocial behaviour are likely to have
experienced many disadvantages. (Similar females have been omitted from
this analysis because their numbers are so small—a fact which is likely
to reflect both nature, in the shape of genetically determined
propensity, and nurture, socially constructed gendered roles.) In
childhood, between the ages of three and 13, the Dunedin boys with the
worst conduct problems at home and school also displayed "neurological
abnormalities, low intellectual ability, reading difficulties,
hyperactivity, poor scores on neuropsychological tests, and slow heart
rate."
They were often being emotionally rejected by their
parents as young as the age of five, as well as by their peers and
teachers. In contrast, those whose offending and antisocial behaviour
did not begin until adolescence tended not to suffer from these
disadvantages. Although both groups behaved badly in adolescence, those
on the life-course persistent path were also likely at that stage to
experience weak bonds with other family members, continued educational
difficulties and poor relationships. Their criminal convictions were
more serious, and more often for crimes of violence.
In Dunedin, the 10 per cent of boys whose antisocial
behaviour had started before adolescence were about three times as
likely as the "adolescence- limited" group to be convicted of crimes
after the age of 26, and they "tended to specialise in serious
offences." Although some from the larger "adolescence-limited" group
were still committing offences as adults, these tended to be relatively
trivial. The difference between the groups was especially marked when it
came to using violence: the 47 men deemed to be on the life-course
persistent pathway accounted for five times their statistical share of
all violent crime.
Not only were they committing much more crime, their
lives were in much worse shape in other ways. At 26, they were much more
likely than the "adolescence-limited" group to be abusing alcohol, and
to have suffered symptoms of schizophrenia, paranoia and depression.
They were more likely to have abused their partners, and while they had
fathered more children, they were less likely to be helping to rear
their offspring. More than half had no high-school qualifications, and
only one of them had attended college.
A persistent antisocial personality is, to put it
mildly, a daunting prospect. However, among those who fit this
definition is a still more intractable minority: the group defined as
psychopaths. There are no studies of their prevalence in the general
population, but it is thought that they account for 20 per cent of all
male prisoners. Their classification derives mainly from the work of
Canadian psychologist Robert Hare. In his account, psychopaths are
callous, emotionally "flat," driven solely by their own needs and
welfare, manipulative, and careless of the suffering they inflict.
Moreover, they appear indifferent to punishment, so that the threat of
penal sanctions has little effect on them. According to Hare,
psychopaths are between four and 12 times as likely as others to be
reconvicted of a violent crime within two years of release from prison,
while more than 80 per cent will have reoffended within four years.
There is now some evidence that suggests that like
"regular" antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy may be
discernible in children aged seven or younger. One marker is the
emergence of "callous and unemotional" personality traits. Another is
the presence of unprovoked aggression. Most aggressive children show
"reactive" or impulsive aggression in response to a provocation or
threat. In contrast, the markedly rarer proactive or "instrumental" type
of aggression is unprovoked, and "typically involves planning and
forethought."
The scientists working on the origins of persistent
antisocial behaviour are not looking for "reductionist" or deterministic
explanations of the kind sought by Eysenck. As the Institute of
Psychiatry's Michael Rutter writes, much previous writing on mental and
behavioural disorders has "made the implicit assumption that there is
likely to be just one causal pathway" for each disorder, implying that
the challenge for research is to find it. Instead, he states: "In the
great majority of cases, both psychological traits and mental disorders
are multi-factorial in origin."
The Dunedin study supports this conclusion. Moffitt
and her husband, Avshalom Caspi, have examined some of the environmental
childhood risk factors that appear to predict persistent antisocial
behaviour, and found them to be diverse. They included harsh and
inconsistent parenting that failed to reward good behaviour, conflict
within the family, repeated changes in the main person providing
childcare, and single parenthood. Also significant was a wide range of
cognitive and neurological deficits, which meant children talked later
and had difficulty in learning to read and write, as well as displaying
hyperactivity, impulsive behaviour and anger—all factors that
contributed to an infant personality that was difficult to control. In
contrast, the backgrounds of those whose antisocial behaviour was
confined to adolescence were found to be normal.
Studies of twins and adopted children had already
established that antisocial behaviour is likely to be partly inherited.
Identical twin pairs, who share the same genes, have been shown to be
more likely to share antisocial traits than fraternal, non-identical
ones. The children of criminals, even when adopted at an early age by
non-abusive and non-criminal families, are more likely than average to
become offenders themselves.
In a paper published in 2002, Moffitt, Caspi and some
of their colleagues discuss why there are large differences between
children in their response to maltreatment: "Although maltreatment
increases the risk of later criminality by about 50 per cent, most
maltreated children do not become delinquents or adult criminals." The
authors turned to evidence that neurotransmitters—the chemicals such as
serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine that relay and amplify electrical
signals between the brain's neurons—play a significant role in the
generation of mood, behaviour and general mental health. Serotonin and
norepinephrine are also known to be involved in multiple brain functions
that regulate responses to stress.
The paper's hypothesis was that one of the factors
that differentiates individuals' propensity for antisocial behaviour is
a particular gene—the one responsible for generating the enzyme
monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). This enzyme regulates neurotransmitter
levels in the brain: one of its roles is to get rid of excess serotonin,
dopamine and so on, in order to keep neurological circuits working
smoothly.
In fact, there are five known variants—known as
alleles or genotypes—of the MAOA gene, although three of them are rare.
The authors of the 2002 paper examined the two main types. The
low-activity allele, which programmes the body to produce low levels of
the MAOA enzyme, is found in about one third of males. The more normal,
high-activity allele is found in almost all of the rest. In order to
test their hypothesis about the role of MAOA, the researchers went back
to the Dunedin cohort. Its members' history had already been examined
and described, so that it was already known that between the ages of
eight and 11, 8 per cent of the cohort's children had suffered "severe"
maltreatment, and 28 per cent had experienced "probable" maltreatment.
As we have seen, the team already knew which members of the study had
exhibited antisocial behaviour, and when. Now researchers also found
which of the MAOA genotypes they had by examining their DNA.
As might have been expected, the Dunedin study found
that maltreatment in childhood would, on its own, make someone more
likely to commit crime and display antisocial behaviour. About 35 per
cent of the maltreated men with the normal high-activity genotype had
shown conduct disorder, and 20 per cent had a conviction for violence.
But when the two risk factors were found together—the low-activity
genotype and childhood maltreatment—the correlation with antisocial
behaviour was far stronger. More than 80 per cent of the men in this
category had exhibited conduct disorder, and more than 30 per cent had
convictions for violence. As a group, they were all among the most
violent third of men. No fewer than 85 per cent of the cohort's men with
the low-activity genotype who had also been severely maltreated went on
to develop antisocial behaviour.
In other fields of study, a correlation of this size
would be considered significant. It is not a complete explanation of
antisocial behaviour: after all, some of those in the life-course
persistent group had the high-activity allele. The MAOA gene is likely
to be one of many, each with its own pattern of environmental
interaction, that plays some part in the development of antisocial
behaviour. On the other hand, the risk among maltreated men with the
low-activity MAOA genotype was about the same as the risk that a person
with high levels of cholesterol has of developing heart disease and
greater than the correlation between low bone density and fractures. To
put it another way, it seemed that having the high-activity genotype
conferred a measure of protection from the consequences of childhood
maltreatment. It was possible, the paper's authors said, that this
finding might inform future developments in pharmacology: a drug to
regulate violent behaviour. To date, there has been no research on
whether the effects of a low-activity MAOA genotype might respond to
treatment, or how this might be achieved.
Studies of gene-environment interplay are notoriously
hard to replicate, but in this instance, replication was not long in
coming. By 2005, there had been four further papers that confirmed the
original findings, the last by members of the original Dunedin team.
The huge social and financial cost of failing to
prevent the onset of antisocial personality disorder and persistent
offending may be taken as given. Prison gates are all too often a
revolving door, through which offenders return within months of
regaining their freedom. In recent years, the British government has
invested heavily in jail-based cognitive-behavioural programmes,
designed to improve offender's thinking skills and to curb their
impulsiveness and tendency to use violence. So far, however, the
evidence suggests that the quality of their delivery is patchy and their
value in reducing rates of reconviction marginal, especially with
prisoners at highest risk. Attempts to reduce recidivism among adults
are not futile, and sometimes the simplest interventions—such as
providing the basic skills of numeracy and literacy—have positive
results. Many of those whom one might class as life-course persistent
offenders in fact desist in middle age: even psychopaths often cease
their most damaging activities in their forties.
Nevertheless, in Moffitt's words, there is a sense
that when one tries to modify adult antisocial behaviour, "the horse is
already out of the barn." It seems reasonable, she and her colleagues
argue, to target attempts to restrict the development of antisocial
behaviour on parents and on children themselves.
Research into parent training programmes is now
relatively advanced in Britain and the US. In December 2005, its value
was given the official imprimatur of the National Institute for Health
and Clinical Excellence (Nice). The Institute of Psychiatry's Stephen
Scott, one of the co-authors of the Nice evaluation and a doyen in the
field, summarises the state of knowledge as to what constitutes
effective parent training. Parents, he says, make a much bigger
difference than teachers in the development of children's social skills,
and by the same token—as the Dunedin and other studies indicate—poor
parenting has a devastating impact.
What seem to work, according to several studies by
Scott and others, are rigorous behavioural approaches, administered in
groups over a period of about three months. For some parents, the basic
elements of this training—the setting of boundaries and consistent
rules, the swift application of appropriate disciplinary sanctions and
the giving of praise when things go well—are second nature. For others,
it is clear, they are not.
Training, says Scott, is not effective in all cases:
about a fifth of the children whose parents are trained will fail to
improve significantly. But there is reason to believe that many families
and children can be rescued from a vicious spiral, and placed in a
virtuous one: "After the intervention, parents were giving their
children far more praise to encourage desirable behaviour and more
effective commands to obtain compliance," says Scott in one paper. Their
relationships were significantly better.
It is possible that some of the children whose
behaviour did not improve in this and other studies may also be those
who exhibit youthful signs of psychopathy. If so, this would not be
surprising—psychopaths do not fear punishment and so are unlikely to
show concern over family sanctions, such as a "time out" for misconduct.
Even here, however, the picture may not be hopeless. Not all children
with conduct disorder and "callous and unemotional" (CU) traits will
become adult criminal psychopaths, and while CU children do not respond
to punishment, they do appear to modify their behaviour when good
conduct earns rewards.
Once children reach adolescence, parent training
becomes much less effective. However, researchers at the Institute of
Psychiatry have recently begun to develop means of intervening with
children of this age. Working with schools in London, and focusing on
special institutions for those excluded from ordinary education, the
institute has devised a short cognitive-behavioural course aimed at
aggressive teenagers. The programmes are continuing, but the first,
encouraging, results of a randomised controlled trial have just been
submitted for publication.
The academy can be a compartmentalised place, with
surprisingly little dialogue between disciplines, and mainstream
sociological criminology is only beginning to become aware of the work
described here. It may not evoke a favourable response. A recent issue
of the journal Criminal Justice Matters, published by the Centre for
Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London, contained a fierce
attack on the work of Terrie Moffitt and others. The article accused
researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry and elsewhere of "genetic
fundamentalism—a belief in a mythic, not a real genetics," and suggested
that twin studies that found a genetic component in antisocial behaviour
were without value. Moffitt and her colleagues have, in fact, stressed
that genetic predispositions must be "switched on" by childhood
maltreatment, and that the important thing was to concentrate on
eliminating this and other types of adverse environment.
Asked to give an after-dinner speech to Liberal
Democrat lawyers, I caught a different glimpse of the hostility that
behavioural genetic research into the causes of crime can evoke. After I
had presented an account of some of the work described here, the
response was viscerally critical. Speakers claimed that it was
"deterministic," and would surely lead to a wanton attack on civil
liberties. One distinguished legal practitioner went so far as to demand
who had funded these investigations, claiming that they must have been
cooked up according to some pre-ordered, authoritarian agenda.
None of this research is deterministic. Twin studies,
work on gene-environment interactions and controlled trials of
interventions all describe correlations, risks and probabilities, not
inevitable consequences. It may be likely that a callous, unemotional
child exhibiting severe conduct disorder will, left alone, end up as an
adult criminal psychopath. It is not, however, certain, and any policy
consequences of this work must above all else bear this in mind. At the
same time, it seems intellectually bizarre to disregard the work, let
alone to refuse to continue with lines of research that are in their
relative infancy.
What, then, might the policy consequences be? One
conclusion seems to emerge strongly: that early interventions with
children and young people identified as members of groups at risk
deserve substantial investment and appear to be very promising, offering
the potential for cost-effective ways of reducing enormous individual
and social harms. It seems difficult to argue that to leave antisocial
personalities to develop without attempts at intervention, and thus to
wait until they present themselves as violent adult criminals, is a
sensible public strategy.
Such measures will not, however, be extended without
controversy: some will find in them a version of the dystopic,
authoritarian future depicted by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange.
The many supporters of "just deserts" ideology will attack parent
training programmes as punitive, and be likely to stigmatise those who
undertake them. They will question the social, racial and psychological
assumptions that underly diagnostic tools. The work described here is
far removed from the eugenicist Francis Galton, or indeed Eysenck, but
the memory of 20th-century history will not easily be shifted.
However, as we move from considering possible
treatments for young people who are yet to commit serious crimes to
adults who already have, the implications of the work described in this
paper are likely to become even more contestable, and potentially, more
troubling. On the one hand, the deepening understanding of psychopathy
and persistent antisocial behaviour has enormous potential as a
risk-assessment tool. It has obvious applications in the management and
supervision of offenders within prison and after their release, and in
the imposition of sentences. It is likely to enable probation and other
offender management services to target their resources much more
effectively, and to set parole licence conditions tailored more closely
to the needs and risk profile of individuals.
But criminal justice policy is not derived from
scientific evidence alone. It is conceived in a broader social and
political setting. This includes several volatile elements, above all
governments' desire to be seen as tough on crime and their need for
quick results. This year has seen a string of high-profile cases in
which offenders on probation have committed murders and sex crimes. One
of the most horrifying, the rape and murder of the Reading teenager
Mary-Ann Lenaghan, prompted one Sunday Times writer to ask: "If someone
has not committed a crime, should we lock them up just in case? Tom
Cruise in Minority Report did not like being hunted down for a murder he
had not yet committed, but from the point of view of society wouldn't
that be a good thing? Is it time our criminal justice system did more to
investigate 'pre-crime?' If we did, Mary-Ann Lenaghan might still be
alive."
We already have the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and its
indefinite sentences, and in some US states, " sexually violent
predator" laws consign some high-risk inmates to what amounts to
lifelong preventative detention. One could envisage an ambitious home
secretary, careless of the distinction between prediction and
probability, who might decide that since the police already take DNA
samples on arrest, it would be a simple thing to test those accused of
violent or sexual crimes for their genotype.
For those on the receiving end, such "actuarial
justice" fundamentally changes the premises of the law, and may in time
create unmanageable control problems among prisoners left with few
incentives to conform. Even psychopathic prisoners have a keenly
developed sense of justice when it is applied to them, as I discovered
during a discussion in 2005 with inmates at the Frankland prison DSPD
unit near Durham. When they asked me to explain the provisions of the
2003 act, their reactions were anger and disbelief. "How can they keep
you inside when you've already done your time? Surely it's against the
law?" asked one, a serial violent offender.
Moreover, many persistent criminals eventually stop
offending, although they may well retain other antisocial behavioural
and personality traits. Existing tools do not give us much clue as to
when an individual's offending may stop. Risk science may tell us that
80 per cent of criminal psychopaths will re-offend within four years of
leaving prison. But even that dismal statistic leaves 20 per cent who
will not.
In a paper to be published in a forthcoming volume on
security and human rights, the criminologist Lucia Zedner sets out
further possible pitfalls. Slowly, she contends, Minority Report's
"pre-crime" is becoming a policy reality. Sentences or further detention
based on risk assessment are "counterproductive to any effort to hold
offenders to account, to convey blame, still less to engage their moral
reasoning in potentially penitent… directions." If, in tabloid
caricature, sociological criminology allowed offenders to shirk
responsibility by blaming society, the new behavioural science might
offer them the no less questionable excuse of blaming their crimes on
the interaction between their parents and their genotype.
Evaluation of the implications of the work described
in this essay has barely begun, and it needs to become the subject of a
substantial interdisciplinary debate. Sociological criminologists must
realise that to dismiss it as crude, positivist determinism, as their
forebears once dismissed Galton and Eysenck, is inadequate. Equally,
behavioural scientists require an awareness of the social, political and
legal context in which their findings land. What is certain is that as
knowledge of the human genome and its interaction with its environment
expands, this is a field of study that will not go away.
David Rose
August 2006
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7604
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