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Of Crime and Excuse



We should not.














You choose this.



Alan said…
Lots of people have a crappy childhood and don't turn to a life of crime. That whole idea strikes me as similar to the "more guns more crime" idea. It's obviously false, yet it fits an agenda so it keeps popping up.
Dan said…
While you are correct in stating that the act of committing a crime is a choice for some people we KNOW that the mechanisms most of us use to make the decision is physiologically damaged. Modern medicine has allowed science to actually map the activity of the frontal cortex of people as they view specific images and conceive of specific actions. We know via this method that a small but not insignificant portion of society exhibit sociopathic behaviors and imaging studies show that this subset has a significant variation in how their frontal cortex functions. In essence the portions of the frontal lobe that cause most of us to self censor our activities is defective in sociopathic people. So while yes....choice IS involved for some people the mechanisms for choosing to do or not to do are damaged or defective. And while this is true the incidence of people who can honestly be considered organically defective is small....even though virtually ALL criminals would make use of this type of defense if they could. It's the same mechanism that allows millions of fat Americans to claim they are overweight because they have a defective metabolism when the real truth is they are overweight because they choose to eat more and move less. The number of obese people who have a valid medical reason for obesity is a tiny portion of the fat population. The number of criminals with a structural brain defect is a small portion of the criminal population. But there are physiologic factors involved in criminal's an area worthy of further study.
Peter said…
I generally agree. I've written about this problem in my memoir of prison chaplaincy, 'Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls'. If you'd like an e-copy, e-mail me (my address is in my blog profile) and let me know what format would suit you.