Can we prevent violent crime by intervening in children's brains with drugs and behavioural training programmes? If you heard Joshua Rozenberg’s Radio 4 documentary ‘The Criminal Mind’ on Monday, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s not only easy but a moral imperative. But in my view it is programmes like this that really scramble your brain and stop you thinking straight about complex social issues like crime.

The programme presented a hodge-podge of snippets of research which confusingly mixed up evidence of structural and neurochemical changes in the brain of young offenders, and suggested that they were suffering from defects in brain areas that control emotional impulses and empathy for victims. The message was clear: the ‘unprovoked attacks’ that the programme focused on were the result of what Rozenberg called ‘criminal brains’, and the solution is to fix those brains.

One might think that memories of lobotomies and ECT would have set Clockwork Orange-shaped alarms ringing at this point. But so good was the story Rozenberg was telling that he did not bother to include a single sceptical scientist or criminologist in the programme. Because the wonderful thing about this narrative is that this is not some right-wing authoritarian crusade to control youth. The nice soft-voiced scientists and doctors were telling us that is these children’s brains are defective, it’s not their fault, but the result of abuse and neglect, and so maybe they are not even culpable for their crimes. In impeccable liberal style, we were told that money should be spent on ‘early interventions’ rather than on the criminal justice system. These scientists have even pulled off the coup of recruiting Camilla Batmanghelidjh, whose inspiring work with abused and disturbed children in South London normally sets the standard in her field. What could possibly be wrong with all that?

Firstly, I want to be clear that it is not a matter of denying the scientific evidence, although there are long histories of overconfident claims in biology. It should not really be a surprise to anybody that abuse and hostile social conditions affect people’s brains, although it is perhaps a bit surprising that the results are visible at the gross levels that current brain science works at. But the problem lies in the typical simple-mindedness of scientists who think that we can solve complex social problems through biological interventions. Scientists are heir to the clockwork model of the world, derived from Descartes and Newton, and there is a long history of their disastrous attempts to apply technical fixes to complex problems whose real causes are social and environmental.

One problem with the medicalising, scientific approach is the way it objectifies the people it talks about, treating them as little more than mechanisms. A behaviourist approach pervaded the programme and it was no an accident that it did not ask a single child for their accounts of what was happening in their minds when the committed a crime, for how their lives had led them to that point or for their views on society.

As far as Rozenberg was concerned we were clearly dealing with a single simple object, ‘The Criminal Mind’ of the programme’s title, not ‘criminal minds?’ We can be reasonably sure that the minds and brains Rozenberg was referring to were not those of middle class children at risk of growing up to be swindling bankers. But once the idea of brain defects as the cause of crime becomes established, you can be sure it will proliferate.

And the greatest danger is the naivete of not just scientists but well-meaning liberals in trying to fix crime in this way. No doubt Camilla Batmanghelidjh's approach is not reductionist, and one can only admire the way she dispenses love to angry and difficult children. But we should know enough now to know that such well-funded pilot projects never produce good results when they are rolled out nationally, because they are too expensive. What will happen, as penny-pinching governments come under pressure, will be that they will degenerate into drug dispensing programmes, and the drug companies who often drive medicalisation in the first place will laugh all the way to the bank. Fundamentally, the projects are unlikely to work if, after they are finished, the children are dumped back into dysfunctional families and hostile streets.

And not only is it unlikely to work, but such preventative interventions are likely to worsen the very problem they are trying to solve. The cardinal defect of reductionist explanations of crime is the way they locate the problem in the individual, rather than society, and thereby necessarily stigmatise that individual. If you take a naughty five year old and start giving him drugs and behavioural training, on the basis that he is likely to grow up into a criminal, that child is bound to be stigmatised by his peers and picked on even more. For the child the message will be exactly the same as that given by all the people who have mistreated him in the past when he has done something wrong: that he is intrinsically bad and must be fixed. The medical paradigm must insist on drawing a clear line between pathology and normality, but any grown up knows this is a fiction. Abuse, brain pathology and challenging behaviour all come on a continuous spectrum, but nursery workers and social workers will be asked to identify those who are abnormal. We already know from experience of the mental health system that unconscious racism and class bias will enter into these judgements, resulting in overdiagnosis of black and working class children as abnormal.

I do not enjoy being a prophet of doom, but there is too much history to ignore, from irrigation projects that dry up the water table, to herbicide – resistant GM crops that encourage the evolution of even more dangerous herbicide-resistant weeds. There is simply no scientific shortcut which can bypass the need to address the real social causes of crime - poverty, oppression and destruction of community. Attempting to apply such technical fixes will only make matters worse. We must learn that just because scientists can tell us a part of how the problem works, we must not jump to embrace their targeted solutions. Perhaps what needs fixing is the clockwork models of scientists.

That does not mean that as one scientist in the programme suggested, the only alternative is to ‘do nothing’, and let more people be killed by violent youths. The programme also revealed that simply giving offenders vitamins and other dietary supplements cut their rate of offending by 26%. The key point is that we need to make sure that all children get the adequate diet, not to target ‘high-risk individuals’. And we need to do that because it is a childs right, not because we are trying to reduce crime. We need to make sure that all children can access high quality childcare and we need to tackle the real roots of crime, as Tony Blair promised us, so long ago. We should not fall for those seductive quick fixes that substitute for principled action.

Dr David King
March 25 2009