tdaxp

Gideon, writing at a public defender, criticizes castration of violent felons because those violent felons may be rehabilitated:

Prof. Berman asks whether chemical castration (if proven to work) should be employed (actually, why shouldn’t it be). As readers might guess, I am uneasy with this proposition. There are several assumptions here: That we know that “high-risk” offenders will re-offend; that all “high-risk” offenders will re-offend. This does dip into some “Minority Report” territory. I’m quite uneasy by the idea that we will assume that all high-risk offenders are going to re-offend and we need to stop that by subduing the sexual urge by reducing levels of testosterone.

Those are some mighty assumptions and I’m uncomfortable with that. There are (have to be) better alternatives to this. What if we have an offender that, despite being “high-risk” is rehabilitated and wishes to live a normal life?

However, to a large extent, speaking about rehabilitation of violent felons misses the point.

Consider: violent crime is heritable:

Estimates of heritability for antisocial behaviour from recent research in quantitative genetics cluster around 0.50. The most reliable estimates come from contemporary studies in the Netherlands, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Australia and the US, because these studies examine large, representative samples using sophisticated quantitative modelling techniques. A complementary meta-analysis of 51 twin and adoption studies yielded an estimate of heritability of 0.41 for the genetic influence on antisocial behaviour. Estimates of heritability below 0.20 tend to emerge from studies with unusual design features; for example, observational measures, small sample sizes, very wide age ranges, small groups of girls, or adults being asked to report childhood symptoms retrospectively. Similarly, some, but not all, studies yielding estimates above 0.70 have non-optimal designs, such as small sample sizes or adults being asked to report their childhood symptoms retrospectively....

The largest estimates of heritability tend to emerge from studies using measures able to array individuals along a continuum from non-antisocial to severely and persistently antisocial. These are studies using other-reported delinquent or aggressive behaviours (such as the Child Behaviour Check List (CBCL) externalizing scale), and self-reported personality traits (such as the MPQ aggression scale). These studies tend to include a very large number of items inquiring about a variety of antisocial attitudes and behaviours. Some of these items, such as robbery, are exhibited rarely by people, but others, such as enjoying violent films, are exhibited commonly. As a result, the instruments are sensitive to population variation in the severity of antisocial behavior. Overall, the distribution of more than 100 estimates of heritability from recent papers approximates a bell-shaped normal curve. This distribution is to be expected from a sample of more than 100 imperfect estimates of a true effect that equals 50% in nature.

Further, we are currently undergoing dysgenics as the most violent mate with each other:

As well as the possibility that genes influence antisocial behaviour, it is also possible that antisocial experience can influence how genes are distributed in the population. This is an implication of the finding that men and women mate on the basis of similarity between the partners’ antisocial behaviour (this is called assortative mating), and that couples in which both people exhibit antisocial behaviour tend to have more children than the norm. Assortative mating on a genetically-influenced phenotype, such as antisocial behaviour has consequences for genetic variation in the population. Because people form unions with other people like themselves, the result is that families differ more from each other on average than they would if people mated randomly. If successive generations mate assortatively, genes relevant to the phenotype will become concentrated within families. Consider height as an example. Whole families clearly differ from other families in terms of height, yet families are made up of persons who are similar in height. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon is likely to lie in the positive assortative mating that occurs for this trait.

Castration of violent criminals, besides reducing the likelihood of a particular criminal breaking the law again (and quite possibly inflicting a punishment seen as worse than a 20 year sentence), does even more good to future generations. Violent criminal parents tend to have violent criminal children, so unless we want future generations to experience violent crime, we need to fight the causes of violent crime.

And part of the solution is eugenics.

On the web: Genetics and Human Behavior: The Ethical Context: Current findings: Quantitative Genetics.

An Associated Press story, 3 Charged in PC Magazine Editor's Death:

Three men have been charged with murdering a senior editor for PC World magazine in what police said was an attempt to steal marijuana that the victim's son grew in their home for medical use.

Rex Farrance, 59, the San Francisco-based magazine's senior technical editor, was shot in the chest on Jan. 9 after masked men broke into his suburban home.

Prohibition kills.

Many commentators, slaves to political correctness and ignorant of science, believe that civic biology is stuck in 1925. When faced with an uncomfortable topic that touches on civics and biology (the fact that blacks make up a disproportionate share of murder victims, or the corollary that blacks make up a disproportionate share of murderers), these commentators immediately assume there are only two sorts of valid explanations

• Disproportionate violence among blacks may be the result of culture
.

• Disproportionate violence among blacks may be the result of race.

they immediately leap to culture-only explanations. Thus, from the Washington Post:

"Blacks in America are facing a unique gun culture," Sugarmann said. "Blacks are disproportionately likely to be confronted with guns, and that leads to the results that we're seeing."

with of course no mention of race. However, there are other explanations. Biology can act a lot like culture, for instance...

Disproportionate violence among blacks may be the result of a stressful environment, including poor nutriotion and greater likelihood of witnesses violence as a child, which leads to biological changes that induce one to violence.

to the almost racial...

Disproportionate violence among blacks may be the result of the unique selection pressures extant throughout the American South until 1865, which explains why 'African-American' blacks, but not Afro-Carribean or African blacks in America.

To epigentic explanations, which are biologically heritable but not genetic...

Disproportionate violence among blacks may be the result of an ancestrally stressful environment that existed at least until the mid-twentieth century, and as such (maternal) cytoplasm regulates embriotic environment such violence becomes disproportionate among blacks.

There are many other explanations as well, including the viral, that may be true. My point is not to favor one explanation or the other. Rather, my point is to point out the politically correct scientific ignorance of the mainstream media sabotages any search for answers. To give just one possibility: if the Jim Crow laws still epigenetically harm African-Americans, an extremely good argument can be made for reparations.

But of course, the politically correct, scientifically ignorant, mainstream media does not bother.

After all, the victims (both in the narrow and extended sense) are only black.

(My thanks to Rob Patterson, a fellow blogger, for provoking this post.)

"States opt for lifetime GPS tags on molesters," by David Lieb, Associated Press, 30 July 2005, http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0730tracking30.html.

It's not just the State of Minnesota anymore...

Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma passed laws this year requiring lifetime electronic monitoring for some sex offenders, even if their sentences would normally have expired. Similar bills have been proposed in Congress and other states, including Alabama and North Dakota.

...

A new Oklahoma law also requires habitual sex offenders to wear GPS monitoring devices for the rest of their lives. Ohio's budget funds lifetime GPS monitoring only for people classified as sexually violent predators.

Ideas this crazy have to be caused by hysterical cable news outlets...

Spurred by headlines of released sex offenders accused of murder, some states are mandating use of the Global Positioning System for tracking. Many lawmakers see electronic monitoring as a natural evolution of statutes that already require sex offenders to register their addresses with authorities.

A basic thought for my legislator friends in Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Alabama, and North Dakota:

The harsher you make a sentence, the more the criminal will try to avoid being caught

And what is the easiest, most obvious way for a pedophile to avoid being caught?

Kill the witness

In other words, if you want to minimize the number of victims like Jessica Lunsford...

After a registered sex offender was charged in March with killing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, Florida legislators mandated tougher prison sentences for people who commit sex offenses against children and required lifetime GPS monitoring after serving time.

encouraging murder isn't the wisest option. And lifetime sentences really, really discourage criminals from getting caught.

Around the blogosphere: PC540 talks sense, and Outside Report examines the issue in depth. Forbush calls some form of pedocide moderate. A wife and mother is heartbreakingly misguided. A compulsive hooker of the yarn variety notes Lunsford-family branding. Chatguard reports just the facts. Pace Forbush, Keith notes that there is muderous monsters deserve death. Omahastar suggests eternal damnation for a lesser offensive.