Randall G Shelden. Social Justice. Volume 27, Issue 2, Summer 2000.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a social movement known as the “eugenics movement.” This movement occurred in the context of widespread fear and nativism. Its aim was to eliminate, or at least physically remove, “bad seeds” from an otherwise healthy American soil. This was based upon the theory of eugenics, which holds that certain problem behaviors are inherited and can be reduced and perhaps eliminated altogether by preventing the carriers of “bad seeds” from reproducing. The theory was based in part on the idea that certain groups—especially racial groups—are inherently “defective” (during this period the term “defective delinquent” was popular), somewhat less than human, and naturally inferior. Not surprisingly, this theory fit in well with the prevailing ideology of “Social Darwinism,” which held white Europeans to be naturally superior and just about every other racial stock to be inferior. The “evidence” produced by “scientific” studies “proved” the theory. Thousands were eventually either imprisoned, deported, sterilized, given frontal lobotomies, or simply killed. Not surprisingly, those originally singled out for social control were immigrants from southern European countries (especially Italians). Later, Jews, Hispanics, the Japanese, and eventually African-Americans would be targeted.
Just when we thought such repressive programs were buried forever in the past, the eugenics movement has been resurrected. Today it is called by other terms, but the procedures, and the faulty theory behind it, are the same. We are again relying upon “scientific” theories and procedures and targeting racial minorities and the poor. Once again, we are operating under the assumption that there are “bad seeds” out there producing bad people. This time, however, there is something new: drugs. Let us look at this more carefully.
It’s in the Genes
Dr. Gail Wasserman, a professor of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University, is in charge of one of the most recent in a long line of attempts to get to the “root causes” of violent crime. What are these “root causes”? They are supposedly found in the genes of certain kinds of children. What kinds of children? Let Dr. Wasserman tell you: “It is proper to focus on blacks and other minorities as they are overrepresented in the courts and not well studied.” So she and her colleagues decided to “study” these “predisposed to violence” youth—all males, all minorities, ages six to 10—by giving them doses of a dangerous drug called fenfluramine, the main ingredient in the diet drug “fen phen.” These children, who had no criminal record, but were considered to be at “high risk” (a code word for poor urban minorities) for future violence, were given a dose of this drug to examine the effects of “environmental stressors” on levels of serotonin in these boys. Fenfluramine, by the way, was withdrawn just a few month s after this “research” was completed (late 1997) because, among other things, it causes potentially fatal heart valve impairments in many patients and brain cell death in others. This information comes from a recent book by two noted medical doctors, Ginger and Peter Breggin, called The War Against Children of Color: Psychiatry Targets Inner City Youth (Common Courage Press, 1998) and Mitchel Cohen’s article, “Beware the Violence Initiative Project,” which appeared in the April 2000 issue of Z Magazine.
For several years supporters of these biological explanations of criminal behavior received support from “twin studies” that purported to “prove” that there was a “crime gene” and that the environment was only indirectly responsible for such behavior by “triggering” behaviors just “waiting to happen.” Despite research debunking such theories, the supporters continued to advance their argument. They were even undaunted after one of their own “experts,” English scientist Cyril Burt, was totally discredited for using fabricated data in his “twin studies,” which purported to prove that certain races were inherently born with low intelligence, leading to their “propensity” to commit crime.
“Predisposed” to Violence
The genetic explanation was reborn with the publications of two books in the 1980s and early 1990s, The Bell Curve and Crime and Human Nature. These publications reopened old wounds in the debate by suggesting that certain racial groups were inherently inferior and, more important, “predisposed” to violent acts. It opened up still another door: the use of certain drugs to “contain” these “violent propensities.”
In 1989, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Public Health Service issued a report calling for strategies of intervention in “minority homicide and violence.” Ironically, the report cited as causes of violence factors like poverty, unemployment, homelessness, the availability of guns, and the glorification of violence within American culture. Yet its recommendation for prevention focused on identifying individuals and modifying their behavior—mostly, as it turned out, with medication. The report flatly stated that: “Targeting individuals with a predisposition to, but no history of, violence would be considered primary as in programs to screen for violent behavior.” This would require “tools to facilitate screening out high-risk individuals for early intervention.” Such screening would target hospital emergency rooms, health centers, jails, and schools “at the lowest levels,” where “acting out” behavior can be identified and dealt with. Perhaps more important, the program would conduct rese arch “on the biomedical, molecular, and genetic underpinnings of interpersonal violence, suicidal behavior, and related mental and behavioral disorders.”
Targeting Infants
More alarming is that infants would be a central focus, with many studies staffing at birth. After all, so the logic goes, at that age there must be biological factors present that would predict later violent behavior! It takes little imagination to deduce whose children would be the target of such “interventions.” In fact, subsequent developments of these violence initiatives often specifically stated that the children of the poor and racial minorities would be the target, as suggested by the quotation from Gail Wasserman. Equally alarming is a paper delivered at a 1989 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Its “findings” claimed that there is research showing that whites and Asians are superior to African-Americans, who, the paper claims, are “smaller brained, slower to mature, less sexually restrained, and more aggressive.” This is not the 19th century, or even the 1930s and 1940s, when such racist beliefs were generally accepted. It is the 21st century, in which we are su pposedly more “enlightened.”
The Department of Justice soon got into the action with its “Program on Human Development and Criminal Behavior.” Illustrating the “scientific” basis of this program and the role of academics in legitimating such movements, the director and co-director of this project were, respectively, Felton Earls, Professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Albert J. Reiss, Professor of Sociology at Yale’s Institute for Social and Police Studies. (The search for the “genetic” source of criminal behavior has always been led by noted academics. The early eugenics movement was at least indirectly supported by academic criminologists, sociologists, and anthropologists from Harvard University, among others. Such support is crucial for the continuation of these programs.) This program would screen and identify children as “potential offenders,” who are “in need of preventive treatment or control.” Specifically, the research would target nine groups, starting in infancy and then at ages three, six, nine, 12, 15 , 18, 21, and 24. The key question to be answered would be, according to the directors of the research: “What biological, biomedical, and psychological characteristics, some of them present from the beginning of life, put children at risk for delinquency and criminal behavior?”
Guess Who’s Providing the Funding?
Led by psychiatrists and funded by some of the largest pharmaceutical companies (such as Lilly, the maker of Prozac, Pfizer, Upjohn, Hoffman-La Roche, Abbott Laboratories, and many more), a program of “research” called the Violence Initiative Project is now underway, with additional funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. The “crime control industry” has now expanded to include the “drug control industry,” as all sorts of alleged “problem behaviors” exhibited by children are viewed as biological in nature and, in some cases, genetic. As Breggin and Breggin write:
Children’s disorders and disruptive or violent behavior in particular remain growth markets. Powerful vested interests, including giant pharmaceutical firms, stand to profit mightily from proposed applications of biological research. Biomedical researchers and their labs and institutes will not readily fold or refrain and retool for a wholly different kind of research.
Government– and drug company-sponsored research will examine infants to predict who will or will not be future “criminals.” Rather than seek out some of the most common social sources of violence—racism, poverty, poor schools, unemployment, etc.—and attempt to reduce or eliminate them, the funding sources will target individuals and the “precursors of violent behavior,” such as “attention deficits” and “hyperactivity,” which, says one 1994 planning document, “manifest early on.”
Fighting Violence with Drugs
Once more, “experts” are trying to predict violence. Dr. Wasserman, in her application for funding for the Violence Initiative Project through the National Institute of Health, claims that:
Genetic and neurobiological research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct…and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive therapies… Such research will enhance our ability to treat genetic predispositions pharmacologically…
Of course, the “violence” they are talking about is that being committed by the poor and racial minorities. Not surprisingly, no one has suggested testing the children of congressmen and senators, or the children of Fortune 500 CEOs (including the children of drug company executives), even though these individuals have historically been responsible for a great deal of death and destruction around the world (as any cursory review of white-collar and corporate crime research reveals). After all, those responsible for such violence are not about to have their genetic makeup “put under the microscope.” These experts are deliberately targeting the poor and racial minorities simply because their very presence poses a threat to the powers that be, just as certain European immigrants posed a threat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The research cited by supporters of such theories is very selective and ignores the vast research that disproves any linkage between biology (including genetics) and crime, especially violent crime. The causes are social, not biological. Indeed, numerous studies have shown that those who commit the most heinous acts of violence have suffered, from an early age, incredible humiliation and brutality from their caretakers (often witnessing one violent act after another). Inevitably, they begin to engage in similar acts against others, as the victim becomes the victimizer. It has nothing to do with genetics; it has everything to do with one’s immediate environment. Violence is further perpetuated by the violence within our own culture.
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
American society is, to put it bluntly, a very violent society. Most of the violence has been committed by those in power (mostly white, by the way) against those without power. Americans have been responsible for a great deal of what has recently been called “ethnic cleansing,” although politicians and the media have been applying the term very selectively. Examples abound: the genocide of the Native American population, the subjugation of African slaves, the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the deportation of Chinese-Americans and Italian-Americans, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in “relocation centers” during World War II, the murderous rampages of the Ku Klux Klan, the McCarthy-era “witch hunt,” the numerous invasions directed toward other countries, plus our support (with money, training, and ammunition) of totalitarian dictatorships around the world (especially in Latin America), mostly in support of corporate interests. Examples could be cited endlessly (interested readers should consult some of the books written by Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Howard Zinn for careful documentation of such “ethnic cleansing”).
Particularly distasteful for me is that almost without exception, these and other forms of “ethnic cleansing”—including what is going on currently—have been supported by some of my fellow academics, who continue to “follow the money”—in most recent cases, money flowing from the federal government (e.g., National Institute of Health, the U.S. Department of Justice) and various drug companies. Many have been following in the footsteps of some of the more famous (and infamous) criminologists of the modem era—direct descendants of Cesare Lombroso, the 19th-century Italian criminologist who was the first to propose that there are “born criminals.” The authors of Crime and Human Nature and The Bell Curve were part of this scientific community (the co-author of the former book was Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson). Their theories purport to demonstrate that criminal behavior is in some way linked to certain biological factors, including genes. Yet they never propose to link their theories to the criminality of the rich and powerful. Their funding would most assuredly be cut off if they were to do so!
These “scientists” have failed to heed the rather common-sense suggestion made by Noam Chomsky over 30 years ago, when he wrote about “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” He suggested that since we in academia have plenty of time on our hands and access to almost unlimited research materials, we have the responsibility to “speak the truth and to expose lies.” I take this charge very seriously and even take some of the responsibility for the damage that has been and continues to be done to poor and defenseless people, especially the children of the poor, who are far too often mere guinea pigs for the “scientific” research of my fellow academicians. The dollars they continue to receive are tainted with the blood of thousands of crime victims the world over.
I often wonder whether there is a “gene” that would predict the tendency to “follow the money” and couch research questions that direct the inquiry toward the most powerless and defenseless groups in the country. To put it closer to home: I wonder if any academicians at University of Nevada, Los Vegas, would dare to propose testing the children of the families living in Summerlin, Desert Shores, Spanish Trails, or other upper-middle-class white communities to see if they have “traits” that would lead them to commit violent crimes someday?