The medicalization of repression: eugenics and crime.

Abstract

The danger of therapeutic tyranny lies in the fact that under a purely therapeutic approach to crime, health standards and regulations can become little more than tools for political coercion and oppression [ 1]. There is an increasing tendency in both politics and academia to seek biological explanations for crime. These theories parallel a growing support for biomedical or technological solutions to the social problems of crime, and assume that crime is a reflection of the quality of our people (i.e., that criminogenic characteristics are inherent in people, can be identified, and can be treated) [2]. Proposed solutions include both direct interventions (such as psychosurgery or drug treatments to reduce the likelihood of recidivism) [3 ] and sleuthing for criminogenic traits prior to any anti-social behavior [4]. Citing public health preventive medicine programs [5], for example, both the screening of infants for XYY chromosomal abnormalities [6] and the testing of small children for genetic "deficiencies" [7] have been used to support state intervention in the very personal lives of very young people. Some argue that we have crossed a new horizon with this approach to crime; that it is a social advance coinciding with technological advances in unraveling the mysteries of DNA and the biomedical intricacies of human behavior. They are convinced that this new ability to identify criminogenic characteristics creates a social duty, as burdensome as that might be, to intervene in the most hitherto private dimensions of human beings in order to substantially reduce crime. We are less millennial. We perceive these current biological theories and intervention strategies as simply a continuation of much older theories and methods of social control; methods that sought to locate the cause of anti-social behavior within individuals as a way of justifying the status quo and explaining away its failures. The "scientific explanation" of crime may have changed and the proposed medical solution may have more terrible consequences, but the underlying assumptions and values have remained virtually unchanged. As a result we are faced with a recurring but subtle threat to personal integrity and self