Does crime trace its root in biological influences ?

By Ashley:


Adrian Raine is the Richard University Profesor of criminology, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pensylvania. He spent four years as a prison psychologist. He tries to understand how some people become violent psychopaths. In his book " The anatomy of violence", he asserts that violent behavior results from bad environments and biological disorder too. He uses the term of "neurocriminology" which is the study of the minds of violent criminals and compare them to the brains of other people.

As two hundred studies have shown, a half of agression, crime and violence can result from genetic influences. Similarly, a hundred brain studies show that brain damages in structure and functioning make aggressive adolescents and violent adults. Genes influence the brains which alter behavior.

Not only genes but also early environment can influence the brains. A bad neighborhood and poverty can change dramatically some people which contribute to their violent behavior. Birth complications, biological predispositions like a mother who smokes and drinks during pregnancy, and social influences such as negative home environment possibly account for adult violence.

A bad  nutrition during pregnancy is also a reason for the baby to become withdrawn in adulthood, or children with poor nutrition at the age of three can wind up in aggressive and antisocial teenager.

 It has been proved from dozen of randomized controlled trials that while stimulants, anti-psychotics, and mood stabilizers can reduce aggressiveness in teenagers and children,    medications that reduce testosterone can reduce sexual drives and sex offenses in adult sex offenders.

Poor mothers who are advised to reduce smoking and drinking during nurse visitation have their children with    half less risks to be juvenile delinquents during their teenage years. Early environmental enrichment such as good nutrition, exercise and cognitive stimulation from age three to five "improve brain functioning at age eleven and reduces crime at age twenty-three by thirty-five percent".

There is evidence from two randomized controlled trials in England and the Netherlands that young prisoners who were provided with omega-3, which is essential for brain structure and function, in their meals reduced serious offending by thirty-five percent.

Finally, Raine suggests a healthy brain development of every child in the society to prevent any potential violence in the future, and maintains that "better brains can make for better behavior for some, and a better future for all."

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/03/health/biology-crime-violence/index.html?hpt=hp_bn13