Unfair (9 page)

A good example of the interplay between genes and environment is the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), which breaks down certain neurotransmitters and is encoded on a single gene.
Scientists have suggested that if you happen to have a version of this gene that produces less of the enzyme, your likelihood of committing a violent crime by age twenty-five is increased several hundred times, but only if you've
also
experienced early childhood abuse.

On a more general level, the environment can play a powerful role in how our brains develop, particularly during the prenatal, infant, and early childhood periods, with a resulting impact on future criminality. There are head injuries, yes, but also experiences that shape us and may increase our likelihood of eventually breaking the law.

Some of those experiences have to do with missing out on key things that our bodies need to build a healthy brain.
A wealth of evidence, for example, shows that nutritional deficiencies in the womb and during childhood can lead to cognitive dysfunction.
Even micronutrients appear to matter: several studies link low levels of trace elements like zinc and iron with increased aggression.

Exposure to certain toxic substances can also play a role.
If your mother smokes during pregnancy, you are approximately three times more likely to commit a crime in adulthood.
And similar patterns emerge with respect to alcohol abuse.
Particularly disturbing are the elements outside a mother's control: if you're born in a certain neighborhood in a certain country at a certain time, you may be exposed to heavy metals linked to violent behavior every time you drink a glass of water or breathe.

There is growing evidence, for instance, that lead poisoning from gasoline may have been a major contributor to the sharp rise in violent crime between the 1960s and 1990s.
The theory is that kids were exposed to airborne lead dust from car emissions in the 1940s and 1950s, which led to reduced brain volumes and dysfunction, particularly in the frontal cortex (again, the part of the brain that frequently shows abnormality in violent populations).
As a result, two decades later, those with high exposure had a reduced ability to regulate their emotions and impulses, with criminal consequences.

Other critical experiences come from interpersonal interactions.
It matters what your parents, siblings, friends, and neighbors are like.
Having a mother and father who are abusive or neglectful, being an outcast at school, and falling in with delinquent friends all seem to increase one's likelihood of committing a crime.

And many of these risk factors appear to have a multiplicative effect: a hyperactive ten-year-old with a low IQ living in poverty with an antisocial single mother who engages in harsh discipline and frequent abuse—all known predictors of delinquency—is several times more likely to commit a violent crime by age eighteen than a ten-year-old who simply has a low IQ.

Even when genes and environment leave a person at a low risk of criminality, being in a certain age group may bump it up.
We know that people in their late teens and early twenties are disproportionately represented in the rolls of criminal offenders.
A recent
survey from Great Britain found that people between sixteen and twenty-four were behind more violent crimes than
all other age groups taken together
.

Part of the explanation is that our brains
develop
, just like the rest of our bodies—but in fact more slowly than the rest of our bodies.
The frontal lobes, particularly the areas that regulate judgment, decision-making, and self-control, may not completely mature until people are well into their twenties.
As you'd expect from looking at their brains, adolescents tend to be less adept at considering the consequences of their actions.
Lacking the fully formed quick-decision-making structures that steer adults away from potentially dangerous criminal activities without needing to deliberate, adolescents sometimes get lost trying to figure out how risky something is: Should I pull the gun out of my pocket? Should I throw this bottle at that car? Should I inhale this drug?
According to one theory, part of the problem may be that while the prefrontal cortex is a late bloomer, the amygdala—which deals with emotional reactions and reward processing—is a precocious debutante, leaving those in their late teens very susceptible to the allure of criminal actions and the sway of their emotions.

From an evolutionary perspective, the adolescent brain's characteristics and its lengthy development seem baffling, but some scientists believe that the distinctive features of the adolescent brain that spawn risk-taking and novelty-seeking may actually have been adaptive in our ancestral past, encouraging adolescents to move out into the world, develop new social connections, gain valuable new experience, and take the chances necessary for success in a competitive environment. We may get caught up considering the current costs of a youthful mind—measured in alcohol and drug overdoses, car accidents, fights, and arrests—and miss the benefits of an adolescent brain: the willingness to experiment, to meet new people, the endless desire for learning, feeling, and knowing what the world has to offer.

One bright sign is that in recent cases a majority of Supreme
Court justices have seemed to accept the scientific evidence that there is a fundamental difference between juvenile minds and adult ones.
In both
Graham v. Florida
, which eliminated sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders who did not commit homicide, and
Roper v. Simmons
, which abolished the death penalty for those under eighteen, the Court noted that young people are not only more vulnerable to peer and other outside pressures but may also lack the psychological development to act responsibly. We need to extend this new understanding to all people, young and old, whose brain function leaves them at special risk.

Yet convincing the Supreme Court and the broader public that crimes often reflect neural deficits is just half the battle against the “mug shot” view of criminality. To eliminate the myth that poor character or an evil soul is behind criminal behavior, we also need to establish that even those
without
brain abnormalities are subject to powerful situational influences that shape the decision to break the law. Genetic, biological, and experiential factors leave some individuals at a vastly higher risk of committing a crime, but most people's moral identities are never set in stone. The particular circumstances in which we find ourselves can make all the difference.

Two seeds from the same pod can grow into very different trees.
Just look at the Bulger boys: James (nicknamed Whitey) and William (called Bill).

They were raised in South Boston, two of the six children of James and Jean Bulger.
The elder James had lost part of his arm after an accident and struggled to find steady work, so the family lived in Old Harbor, the first public housing project built in New England.
Whitey and Bill shared a room with their younger brother, Jackie, until Bill was a sophomore in high school, while the girls were together in a room down the hall.
Though the project has since been taken over by drugs and despair, back then
Old Harbor was a community of two-parent households, poor but striving.
The Bulgers did not have much, but they had their family and they had their dignity.

In early adolescence, however, Whitey's and Bill's lives would take very different turns.

Whitey stayed local and fell in with the gangs down on Mercer Street.
The boys he hung out with skipped school and got into fights and sometimes worse.
Whitey was fourteen when he was first arrested for stealing.
In short order he would be picked up for larceny, forgery, battery, assault, and armed robbery.

Age fourteen was similarly pivotal for Bill: it was then that he decided to head across town to Boston College High School rather than sticking with his friends at South Boston.
While Whitey was brawling and getting into trouble, Bill was doing his homework and working at John and Mary Karp's meat market for tuition money.
Later, while Bill was immersing himself in the scholarly world of Boston College, Whitey was robbing banks, a pursuit that eventually landed him a major prison sentence.

The further the brothers walked, the more their paths diverged.

Bill went off to law school and made law review, which set him on a road that would see him grow into a powerful and effective politician: a state representative and Massachusetts Senate president.
As a legislator, he fought against child abuse and for education and welfare reform, among other issues.
He was later appointed the twenty-fourth president of the University of Massachusetts and would go on to collect more than twenty honorary degrees.

And Whitey?
After he was released, following nine years in prison, he rose to be the major organized-crime boss in Boston—and the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning movie
The Departed
.
When Osama bin Laden was killed, Whitey moved into his spot as America's most wanted man.
After authorities finally caught him, he was convicted of participating in eleven murders, along with drug trafficking,
extortion, racketeering, and other crimes, and given two life terms in prison plus five years.

All that said, we shouldn't overstate the case: Bill, like many twentieth-century Boston politicians, did not have a career free of controversy, and he remained staunchly loyal to Whitey, refusing to assist authorities in catching him. Still, cronyism and hardball politics are quite different from murder and drug trafficking. And whatever affection he maintained for his older brother, Bill's love of scholarly endeavors, his professional experiences, and his everyday life set him in a wholly different sphere.

It is possible, of course, that Whitey and Bill were different genetically—they were not identical twins, after all; they were just brothers. It is also possible that in one of those teenage fights Whitey suffered a traumatic brain injury that led to problems with impulse control. But the most plausible explanation is simply that the brothers inhabited two very different environments at critical moments in their lives.
Our surroundings often exert such a powerful influence that they all but erase the effects of disposition.

Consider a modern-day Whitey. He is sixteen years old, wearing a mask, and his hand is on a gun inside his jacket. As part of a gang initiation, he is supposed to rob the first person who walks by the graffitied alley he's standing in. He does—shooting and killing the man, a father of three, in the process.

Reading this brief description, most of us already have a causal story in mind that focuses on the flawed character and poor choices of the boy. But what role might the situation have played in the terrible crime?

As a starting point, let's rule out some of the elements of the situation that clearly could not have played any sort of causal role—the mask he was wearing, for example. The conventional account of the criminal's mask is that bad people who want to commit bad acts cover their faces in stockings or wear balaclavas so that they can do what they want—burglarize, rob, rape,
or murder—without being identified and caught. It is a tool employed by a person to assist him in accomplishing his chosen end.

That seems uncontroversial enough, but researchers have found that the mask itself can be the
source
of harmful behavior.
In one experiment, a group of elementary school students at a Halloween party played games—first wearing their normal clothes, then their costumes, then their normal clothes again.
In the “anonymous” second set of games, students were significantly more aggressive, but that aggression disappeared when they removed their masks for the final games.
It seemed to be the costumes and not the children's inherent character that mattered—a finding that some have connected to anthropological research showing that societies in which warriors mask or change their appearance during battle are far more likely to also kill and torture their victims.

As a follow-up, the researchers decided to look at whether the anonymity of wearing costumes could encourage kids to commit an actual crime.
In the experiment, young trick-or-treaters entered a home where there was a bowl of candy and a bowl of coins.
The person who greeted the children told them that they could have one piece of candy each and, if they asked, told them that the money was for charity.

So what did the kids do as soon as the greeter left to go into another room?

Well, lots of them stole candy, as well as money.
Some groups took the entire bowl of treats.
But there was an interesting twist: in one condition of the experiment, the woman first asked the children for their names and addresses. These kids didn't steal. The anonymity effect of the mask had been neutralized.

Now consider another of the tools used in the modern-day Whitey's crime: the gun.
We have all heard the expression “Guns don't kill people; people kill people.” Even for those who view the NRA with deep distrust and contempt, this bumper-sticker
wisdom has a certain logic: guns are inanimate objects, after all. They don't have the power to influence someone's behavior.

Except that research now suggests they do.

Clutching a weapon can change us.
In one set of studies, participants were each given either a toy gun or a non-weapon, like a ball, to hold while images of different people appeared on a screen.
Participants were told that when the picture showed someone with a gun, they should quickly point the object they were holding at the screen; when the image revealed someone with a phone, wallet, or shoe, they should aim at the ground.

The results were astounding. The simple act of wielding a gun biased participants' assessment of how dangerous someone was.
With a gun in hand, participants were significantly more likely than those holding benign objects to aim at people on the screen.
Moreover, simply having a gun conspicuously visible inside the laboratory did not have a significant effect; participants had to be holding it.