The Anatomy of Violence Read online

  At that point, I’d had enough of Bodrum and Turkey, and I told the police I was off to the neighboring island of Kos in Greece in the next two days. Remarkably, they decided to expedite the trial. It was something of a ceremony at the outset. It started off at the police station. I was placed next to my assailant, and we were marched through the center of the town, side by side, to the courthouse. Quite a number of people came out to watch, as I had been featured in Bodrum’s local newspaper the previous day, pictured with a prominent white bandage on my throat. Many of them pointed at us and yelled at the defendant. Although whatever they said was incomprehensible to me, it was clear that the defendant was not a popular man.

  The trial itself was novel, to say the least. The courtroom looked like a scene out of the Nuremberg trials, but in a distorted dream. There was no jury at all. Instead, there were three judges in scarlet robes seated loftily above us. The defendant did not have an attorney. Neither did I, for that matter. Adding to the strangeness, none of the judges could speak or understand any English, and I certainly could not speak Turkish. So they procured a cook who could speak some English and serve as my interpreter. It was all very surreal.

  I gave my testimony. The judges asked me how I could identify the assailant given that the incident had occurred just after three a.m. and it had been dark. I described to them how the moonlight was streaming through the window by my bed, illuminating one side of the assailant’s face as we struggled. That I had frantically wrestled with him and that that gave me a sense of his stature and build. I said that I could not be completely sure—but frankly, whether that part ever got translated, I’ll never know.

  After I gave my testimony through the cook, the defendant gave his testimony. Whatever he said in Turkish, the judges were not persuaded. They found him guilty as charged. It was as simple as that.

  After the verdict one of the judges ushered me and my translator over to the bench. He told us that the defendant would be brought back later for sentencing, and that it would be a prison sentence of several years’ duration. Justice is swift and efficient in Turkey, I thought. I had seen on that trip more than one elderly man with a hand missing, a vestige of the days when theft was punished by detaching the offending part of the perpetrator’s anatomy. That had seemed harsh when I had seen it earlier on my trip. But at that moment in the courtroom, in spite of the seeming lack of due process, hearing that my attacker would see significant prison time was music to my ears. Justice, as they say, is sweet.

  Until that experience in Bodrum, violence had been primarily an academic concern for me. I’d tolerated my fair share of small-scale crime up to that point—two burglaries, theft, and an assault—but having one’s throat cut can change the way one looks at the world, or at least at one’s self. My girlfriend and I left the next day for Greece, but as I simmered under the hot sun on the beach in Kos, I remember suddenly feeling a surge of anger about the whole ordeal. The thief, who easily could have killed me, had gotten off easy. He should have been beaten up. His throat should be cut. He should spend the rest of his life a fitful sleeper, hypersensitive to the slightest sound in the night. A few years inside did not seem like justice. It perhaps should have been enough, but to me, especially at that moment, it wasn’t.

  This experience had a powerful effect on me. It broke through my outer façade of liberal humanitarian values and put me in touch with a deep, primitive sense of retributive justice. From an assured English-bred opponent of the death penalty, I became a person who could no longer be ruled out of a jury pool for a capital crime in the United States. An evolutionary instinct for vengeance was triggered inside me, and it has stayed with me for years.

  Consequently, I have something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde attitude about my work investigating the biological basis to crime. One conclusion I’ve drawn from the research presented in this book is that biological factors early in life can propel some kids toward adult violence. Risk factors like poor nutrition, brain trauma from childhood abuse, and genetics are beyond an individual’s control, and when those factors are combined with social disadvantages and our society’s anemic ability to spot and treat potential offenders, the odds are that people with these disadvantages will turn to crime. That means I likely should cut my assailant some slack. And if the standards of that hospital I was in are anything to go by, I’m sure a grim Turkish prison is very unlikely to change his criminal behavior. Are we doing justice to the offender? That’s the Dr. Jekyll in me speaking, and it’s the spirit in which my scientific work is conducted.

  But another man inside me doesn’t give a damn about what caused my attacker to develop into a violent offender. Mr. Hyde retorts that the man nearly killed me and he should be nearly killed too. To hell with forgiveness and pseudoscientific drivel about early biological risk factors that constrain free will. Out of professional interest, I should have investigated further, but at the time, in his specific case, I did not care. I do know that during the summer months before attacking me he had already committed nineteen thefts—he owned up to the police after his capture so he would not later be prosecuted for them. None of these victims had been injured—so I put down my bad luck to Mr. Hyde’s instinct of leaping up at him and grabbing him by the throat. In any event, Hyde rants that a recidivistic criminal like him should be locked up and the key thrown away forever—we need to protect ourselves from these dangerous villains.

  In the intervening years I’ve had more time to reflect on my reactions to that attack. Is defensive aggression genetically built into us? Can my brain be wired to aggressively respond even though my rational mind, trained by years of experience, tells me that’s just not the right response? And what do I make of the fact that my physical perception of that suspect in the identity parade biased me to conclude he was the culprit? During that instant there in the hotel lobby, as I gazed on his torso and face, there was literally a “body of evidence” standing in front of me, a man with the anatomy of violence written all over him—a body I’d had tangible experience of during my struggle.

  That body of evidence, and the sliver of moonlight streaking into the dark bedroom allowing me to see my attacker’s face, symbolizes to me in a metaphorical sense the dawning of a new beacon of research light helping us to identify the violent offender—and what makes him tick. A radical change has been taking place in recent years regarding our understanding of how and why people become violent criminals. That change is what The Anatomy of Violence is all about.

  The dominant model for understanding criminal behavior has been, for most of the twentieth century, one built almost exclusively on social and sociological models. My main argument is that sole reliance on these social perspectives is fundamentally flawed. Biology is also critically important in understanding violence, and probing through its anatomical underpinnings will be vital for treating the epidemic of violence and crime afflicting our societies.

  Today this perspective is slowly but surely seeping into public consciousness, largely because of two recent scientific developments. First, molecular and behavioral genetics is increasingly demonstrating that many behaviors have in part a genetic basis. Genes shape physiological functioning, which in turn affects our thinking, personality, and behavior—including the propensity to break the laws of the land, whatever those laws may be. Second, revolutionary advances in brain imaging are opening a new window into the biological basis of crime. Together these two advances are prodding us to redefine our sense of self. They have jointly placed us on the threshold of the new discipline that I call neurocriminology—the neural basis to crime—which involves the application of the principles and techniques of neuroscience to understand the origins of antisocial behavior. By better understanding these origins, we will improve our ability to prevent the misery and harm crime causes. The anatomy of violence encapsulates this exciting and vibrant new approach to the discipline of criminology that Lombroso himself spawned but that had been all but abandoned throughout the twentieth century.

&nb
sp; There is a third development that is not so much scientific as an undeniable historical fact. The heavy emphasis on an exclusively social approach to crime and violence throughout the last century did nothing to turn the rising tide of this perennial problem. It is widely acknowledged in criminology that as crime went up throughout the 1970s and 1980s our society largely gave up on the rehabilitation of inmates. Prisons became holding bays for the unrepentant—not retreats for the rehabilitation of lost souls, as the Pennsylvania Prison Society espoused in the early nineteenth century. That single-minded approach has just not worked.

  Thinking of human behavior from a biological perspective is no longer controversial—you can hardly open a newspaper or magazine today without reading about a new breakthrough in how genes and the brain shape our personality and influence the moral and financial decisions we make, or what we buy, or whether we turn out to vote or not. So why would they not also influence whether we commit a crime or not? The pendulum is slowly but surely swinging us back to Lombroso’s dramatic nineteenth-century intuition, and forcing us to revisit the tangled ethical quandaries and legitimate social fears inherent in applying a neurocriminological approach. But when one considers the myriad ways in which violence plagues us, the stakes are too high, and the potential good is too great, to ignore the compelling scientific evidence we are discovering about the biological roots of crime.

  I have three central objectives in writing this book: First, to inform readers of the intriguing new scientific research that I and other scientists have conducted in recent years, focusing on the biological basis for crime and violence. Second, I want to stress that social factors are critical both in interacting with biological forces in causing crime, and in directly producing the biological changes that predispose a person to violence. Third, I want to explore with you the practical implications of this emerging neurocriminological knowledge, ranging from treatment to the legal system to social policy—both today and in the future.

  I have written this book for the general reader who has at least a passing interest in crime, as well as for undergraduate and graduate students who want an accessible introduction to a new and exciting perspective on crime and violence. Anyone with an inquisitive mind, who is curious about what makes the criminal offender tick will, I hope, find something of interest in these pages. In The Anatomy of Violence I’m going to reveal the internal mechanisms of violent crime as well as the way external forces interact with them to produce criminals. I will lay out what biological research is revealing on the root causes of crime. These deep roots are now being dug up using neuroscience tools, exposing the biological culprits giving rise to violence. Throughout I have included case studies of a rogues’ gallery of killers to illustrate my points.

  More than anything I hope that this book will open your mind not just to how biological research can contribute to our understanding of violence, but also how it may lead to benign and acceptable ways of reducing the suffering violence causes to societies throughout the world. Biology is not destiny. We can unlock the causes of crime with a set of biosocial keys forged from a new generation of integrative interdisciplinary research combined with a public-health perspective.

  But we need to exchange views in an open and honest dialogue in order to ensure sensible use of this new knowledge for the good of everyone, to develop a framework for further research, and to firmly grasp the neuroethical issues surrounding neurocriminology to more effectively apply this new knowledge. We’ll begin our discussion with that pivotal moment when a scientist other than myself stared at the anatomy of a different violent offender, and began the long and precarious journey along the causeway of neurocriminology.

  1.

  BASIC INSTINCTS

  How Violence Evolved

  The scientific study of biological criminology started on a cold, gray November morning in 1871 on the east coast of Italy. Cesare Lombroso, a former Italian army medic, was working as a psychiatrist and prison doctor at an asylum for the criminally insane in the town of Pesaro.1 During a routine autopsy he peered into the skull of an infamous Calabrian brigand named Giuseppe Villella. At that moment he experienced an epiphany that was to radically alter both his life and the course of criminology. He described this pivotal experience in the following way:

  I seemed to see all at once, standing out clearly illuminated as in a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal, who reproduces in civilized times characteristics, not only of primitive savages, but of still lower types as far back as the carnivores.2

  What did Lombroso see as he gazed deep into Villella’s skull? He detected an unusual indentation at its base, which he interpreted as reflecting a smaller cerebellum—or “little brain”—seated under the two larger hemispheres of the brain. From this singular and almost ghoulish observation, Lombroso went on to become the founding father of criminology, producing an extraordinarily controversial theory that was to quickly have significant cross-continental influence.

  Lombroso’s theory had two pivotal points: that there was a basis to crime originating in the brain, and that criminals were an evolutionary throwback to more primitive species. Criminals, Lombroso believed, could be identified on the basis of “atavistic stigmata”—physical characteristics from more primitive stages of human evolution, such as a large jaw, a sloping forehead, and a single palmar crease. Based on his measurements of such traits, Lombroso created an evolutionary hierarchy that placed Jews and Northern Italians at the top and Southern Italians (including Villella), along with Bolivians and Peruvians, at the bottom. Perhaps not coincidentally, at the time there was much higher crime in the poorer, more agricultural south of Italy, one of the many symptoms of the “southern problem” besetting the recently unified nation.

  These beliefs, which were based partly on Franz Gall’s phrenological theories, flourished throughout Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were discussed in parliaments and throughout public administrations as well as in universities. Contrary to appearances, Lombroso was a famous, well-meaning intellectual, as well as a staunch supporter of the Italian Socialist Party. He wished to employ his research to serve the public good. He abhorred retribution and instead placed the emphasis of punishment on the protection of society.3 He strongly advocated rehabilitation of offenders. Yet at the same time he felt that the “born criminal” was, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Prospero, “a devil, a born devil, upon whose nature nurture can never stick,”4 and consequently favored the death penalty for such offenders.

  Perhaps because of these views, Lombroso has become infamous in the annals of criminological history. The theory he spawned turned out to be socially disastrous, feeding the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century and directly influencing the persecution of the Jewish people. The thinking and vocabulary of Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938, which excluded Jews from public schools and ownership, owes a rhetorical debt to Lombroso’s writings and theories, as well as those of the students who followed him into the early twentieth century.5 The major difference in Mussolini’s laws was that Aryans replaced Jews at the top of the racial hierarchy, and Jews were relegated to the bottom alongside Africans and below Southern Italians. The dreadful irony in this—a fact carefully avoided in almost all references to Lombroso in contemporary criminological texts—is that Lombroso himself was Jewish.

  Understandably, Lombrosian thinking fell into disrepute in the twentieth century and was replaced by a sociological perspective on human behavior—including crime—which still holds sway today. It is not too difficult to see how this biological-to-social pendulum swing came about. Crime, after all, is a social construction. It is defined by the law, and socio-legal processes hold sway over conviction and punishment. Laws change across time and space, and acts such as prostitution that are illegal in one country are both legal and condoned in others. So how can there possibly be a biological and genetic contribution to a social construction? Surely social causation must be
central to crime? This simple argument has made a compelling case for an almost exclusive sociological and social-psychological perspective on crime, a seemingly sound bedrock on which to build workable principles for social control and treatment.

  What do I make of Lombroso’s claims? Of course I reject Lombroso’s evolutionary scale that placed Northern Italians at the top and Southern Italians at the bottom. Not least because I am half Italian, through my mother, who was from Arpino in the southern half of Italy—I’m not an evolutionary throwback to a more primitive species. And yet, unlike other criminologists, I do believe that Lombroso, stumbling as he did amid his offensive racial stereotyping and fumbling with the hundreds of macabre prisoner skulls he had collected, was on the path toward a sublime truth.

  We’ll now see how modern-day sociobiologists have made a far more coherent and compelling argument than Lombroso ever could have that there is, in part, an evolutionary basis to crime that provides the foundations for a genetic and brain basis to crime—the anatomy of violence. We’ll explore violence in its many shapes and forms, from homicide to infanticide to rape, and suggest from an anthropological perspective how different ecological niches may have given rise to the ultimate in selfish, cheating behavior—psychopathy.

  LOOKING AFTER NUMBER ONE—THE CHEATING GAME

  So why are people more than a hundred times more likely to be murdered on the day they are born than to be murdered on an average day in their life? Why are they fifty times more likely to be murdered by their stepfather than by their natural father? Why do some men, not content to rape only strangers, also want to rape their wives? And why on earth do some parents kill their kids?

  These are among a host of questions that baffle society and that seem impenetrable from a social perspective. But there is an answer: the dark forces of our evolutionary past. Despite what we may think of our good-naturedness, we are, it could be argued, little more than selfish gene machines that will, when the time and place is ripe, readily use violence and rape to ensure that our genes will be reproduced in the next generation.