‘I Blame the Parents’: Fitting New Genes in Old Criminal Laws

Abstract

This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of how the 'genetic revolution' might affect our thinking about criminal law. Would a developing belief that there is a genetic basis to behaviour lead to a different basis for the way we think about criminal law, and in particular about criminal responsibility? Although that is a very large question, not least because there are many, contradictory ways of approaching crime, criminal law and criminal justice, it is not an especially novel one. The nature-nurture debate has appeared in many forms in the development of criminological theories, and theories of criminal law and punishment have long been locked in a struggle between individual responsibility or free will versus social or biological determinism. To this debate we can then add the (belated) contributions of feminist theorists on the gendered nature of crime and criminal law and the important insights of social and cultural theorists in relation to the meaning of blame and responsibility. Drawing on debates about the relationship between law and science, the paper distinguishes between theories which explain abnormality and those which tell us something of 'normality', and concludes that notions of criminal responsibility are generally resistant to explanations (whether from internal or external circumstances) which seek to excuse behaviour. The thesis developed is an essentially negative one, both in its rejection of the idea that the genetic revolution poses particular questions for criminal law and in its reminder that criminal law itself reflects generally the worst things about a society. Like any other available 'knowledge',2 genetics will be a resource to be exploited as the handmaiden of the coercive and controlling tendencies of the criminal justice system. Insofar as the genetic revolution tells us something about ourselves, it will be reflected in criminal law.