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Securing the brain:
the emergence of neurobiology as an
object of crime control
- H.H. Peeters
E-Mail h.h.peeters@outlook.com Student nr. 10071644
First supervisor prof. dr. H.O. Dijstelbloem Second supervisor dr. J. Bos
Abstract
Under the header of biosocial criminology, the past three decades have seen the reemer-gence of biological explanation in criminological research. Unlike its early-twentieth century predecessor, the new criminology that is emerging today does not intend to dis-cover the ultimate causes of crime in the brain. Instead it seeks to model a welter of so-cial, psychological and neurobiological risk factors associated to antisocial behavior. Presently this new way of looking at the brain is increasingly finding its way into Dutch policy practice, where the application of neuroscience is said to be at the international forefront. Though recent applications are mostly still in an experimental phase they are expected to bring a range of new instruments to the field of crime control and criminal justice in the Netherlands.
Each society has responds to crime in its own way. In contemporary society crime science is central to organizing reactions to crime and it is safe to say the emergence of biosocial crime science will alter how crime control and criminal justice are organized. This investigation presents an attempt to investigate how this will transpire, gauging some of the potential repercussions of criminological interest in the brain. Here the Dutch context is used as somewhat of a critical case. Now it is of course impossible to look into the future and describe the manner in which biosocial crime science will con-cretely modify crime control and criminal justice in the Netherlands. However, using a mixture of conceptual, historical and sociological analysis it is possible to abstractly de-scribe the relations between the field of crime science and the social configuration in which it is situated. This is the main aim of this investigation.
It is clear that the new biosocial crime science in many ways presents a break with the objectives, language and priorities that held sway in the mainstream of criminologi-cal theorizing as it developed for much of the twentieth-century. Focused on categories like risk-management, antisocial behavior and early intervention it indicates a new way of thinking about crime. Here we attempt to describe the new modes of action that emerge with this new way of thinking. At its center we find the brain. Through the work of biosocial crime scientists it acquires a social function it did not have before. One may now act on the developing brain to measure, understand and modify its tendencies to-ward a variety of aggressive, violent and antisocial behaviors. How has this become pos-sible? How has the brain been constituted as an object of crime control? To answer this question we take a 2016 report published by the scientific research center of the Dutch department of Justice and Security as our main point of departure, branching out where necessary. A product of a marked enthusiasm for neuroscientific knowledge that has ex-isted since at least the end of the nineteen-nineties, the report titled Neuroscientific Ap-plications in the Juvenile Criminal Justice System provides a systematic exposition of the state of the art of the biosocial crime science as it relates to contemporary crime con-trol practice. As such it provides a key point of transaction between science and policy.
Against this backdrop the investigation proceeds in four stages. The first of the four chapters deals with questions of method. Considering the work of Canguilhem we devel-op a methodology for answering how the brain is constituted as an object of crime
sci-edge. If new facts about the biosocial risk-factors of antisocial behavior’ are conceived simply as the result of a process of disinterested scientific discovery, we fail to take into account that many of the methods and assumptions characteristic of contemporary biocriminology are incongruous with those operative in its more sociologically oriented counterpart. Using the work of the philosopher and historian of science Georges Can-guilhem as a starting point, develop a methodological position that prioritizes the frame-work over the facts. As a purely methodological tool, it involves a break with our belief in the results of objective scientific research, so as to describe how—on what methods, assumptions and questions— new facts are in fact produced.
How—by what methods, assumptions and basic questions—does biosocial criminol-ogy produce criminological facts about the brain? What is the basic puzzle confronting biosocial criminologists? This question is answered over the course of the second chapter of the investigation. It considers three questions: what does biosocial criminology intend to explain, from what objects does explanation proceed and what are its main method-ological instruments for doing so. Contrary to what one might expect the answer to the first of these three question is not so much the legal category of crime, as the neuropsy-chological construct of antisocial behavior. This antisocial behavior is explained by ref-erence to a systemic conception of neurobiology that develops in interaction with its en-vironment. These interactions between brain and environment are seen as so complex that direct causal relations may hardly ever be distinguished on the individual level. For this reason we see that explanation usually proceeds on the basis of a probabilistic rea-soning that aggregates individuals to identify statistical risk-factors of antisocial behav-ior on the group level.
The scientific object of biosocial crime science is thus an environmentally situated antisocial brain known on the group level. If this is how the brain is constituted as a sci-entific object, how does this translate to its emergence as a political object. The third chapter deals with this question. After a brief excursion to the history of biocriminologi-cal research in the Netherlands, the chapter considers Michel Foucault’s work on the re-lations between science and power. Using his concept of power as ‘action upon action’ we empirically describe some of the characteristics of the new forms of crime control suggested in Neuroscientific Applications in the Juvenile Criminal Justice Chain. With-out fail the applications found here are marked by preventative aims of risk-reduction related to the probabilistic reasoning described in the previous chapter. Following the well-known differentiation suggested by Brantingham & Faust we describe preventative biosocial ‘action upon action’ on the primary, secondary and tertiary level of prevention. On each level the aim is to prevent crime by equipping the individual with effective tools of self-regulation, which is the theoretical opposite of antisocial behavior. What emerges is what we call ‘crime control through self-control.’
Crime control through self-control, organized through risk-assessment. What charac-terizes this way of acting on crime? How does it relate to other changes that are today taking place in the domain of criminal justice? To answer in what way the brain is consti-tuted as an object of crime control the final chapter of our investigation considers the tri-partite typology of power-relations—sovereignity, discipline, security—developed in the
later work of Foucault. With it we interpret some of the wider transformations in Dutch crime control that have taken place over the past thirty years. These indicate a shift to-ward a type of power-relation Foucault describes with the word security. It is precisely this concern with security and prevention that comes to the fore in biosocial crime sci-ence. As such the new biosocial crime science fits into a socio-political environment in which crime is increasingly conceived as a problem of instrumental risk-control and se-curity-management, objectives incongruous with many of the criminology and crime control policy that held sway prior to the nineteen-eighties. We therefore conclude that the brain is constituted as an object of security.
the emergence of neurobiology as an object of crime control
Introduction 8
1. What is the object of biocriminological research? 13
1.1 A brief history of the brain 14
1.2 How to study the emergene of a scientific object? 15
2. The biosocial puzzle 26
2.1 The biosocial system 30
2.2 Anti-social behavior, including crime 35
2.3 Integrative modeling of brain and behavior 39
3. The powers of self-control 43
3.1 Biocriminological research in context 46
3.2 Analyzing power and knowledge 50
3.3 Self-control and crime control 57
4. The brain as object of security 65
4.1 What is security? 67
4.2 Security in Dutch crime control 72
4.3 Securing the brain 76
Conclusion 78
Introduction
How could neuroscience be applied in the juvenile criminal justice system? In 2016 the scientific research center of the Dutch department of Justice and Security (WODC ) pub1
-lished a report that set out to investigate this question, thereby responding to an “increas-ing demand for neuroscientific knowledge concern“increas-ing anti-social behavior” in the field of juvenile crime control (Cornet et al. 2016: 197). Drawing on a systematic review of recent literature, the report found that current research into the neurobiological origins of violence and aggression promised various applications that had the potential of making government responses to juvenile delinquency more effective, more efficient and more humane. Neurobiological variables could for instance be added to the psychosocial risk profiles currently used to determine the type of treatment appropriate to a juvenile of-fender under investigation. Here several new forms of treatment presented themselves: anger management classes, neurofeedback training, parent-child therapy, dietary sup-plements and much more. Still at an earlier phase of life, a growing body of research concerning the relation between early childhood brain development and the risk of anti-social behavior later in life suggested various new strategies of early detection, making it possible to divert youths-at-biological-risk from a criminal career. And though many of these neuroscientific applications required much further attention, still others were ready and waiting to be implemented in the Dutch juvenile criminal justice system.
In many ways Neuroscientific applications in the juvenile criminal justice system , as 2
the report was titled, reflects a new approach to crime control. For one, the report may be seen as an element in the reemergence of biological explanation in crime research, a de-velopment that began to take shape toward the start of the nineteen-nineties. In a world in which many believe our brain is key to understanding how we think, feel and behave, it may appear self-evident to use our knowledge of the human brain to inform practices concerned with correcting criminal conduct. But for reasons having to do with the eu-genics that inspired early-twentieth century governments in their violent attempts to manage the nation’s health, post-war discourse on crime has harbored a strong taboo against biological explanations of crime and deviance. The politicians, policy makers
Wetenschappelijk Onderzoeks -en Documentatiecentrum
1
Henceforth referred to as Neuroscientific Applications. References in the text are abbreviated
2
and social scientists of this era quite collectively condemned biological crime science as being prone to a naive determinism. At best such research was considered ignorant to the complex social processes underlying criminality, at worst it was seen as a pseudoscientif-ic instrument of oppression, conducive to Nazi race polpseudoscientif-icy or Soviet social engineering (Rose 2000; Akers 2012; Rafter et al. 2016).
In the nineteen-eighties the force of this criminological taboo still harshly manifested itself in the Netherlands, when a plan for biosocial crime research by the Dutch crimi-nologist Wouter Buikhuisen aroused a storm of public indignation, ultimately forcing him to put a premature end to his career as a scientist (de Kogel et al. 2006). This was at a time in which E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)—an evolutionary biological study into the nature of aggression, morality and altruism—had just caused widespread controversy amongst social scientists (Walsh 2009). The criminological thought that informed policy after the Second World War instead explained crime through a variable combination of psychology and social science. Such science veered between structural approaches meant to identify and improve the social, economic or cultural conditions driving individuals into a life of crime and individual approaches that investigated how the unfortunate individuals these conditions had produced could be re-habilitated through punishment, correction and therapy. It was this dual strategy of social welfare and rehabilitation that largely characterized crime policy over the second half of the twentieth century (Feeley & Simon 1992; Garland 2001; van Houdt & Schinkel 2013).
At the turn of the century a new style of criminological theorizing began to take shape. Propelled by the general advance of the life sciences, the past three decades have seen the reemergence of biological explanation in crime research. This approach to crime, as its proponents are keen to emphasize, has little in common with the crude de-terminism that characterized the early twentieth-century biocriminology propounded by figures like Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso or Havelock Ellis. Rather than searching for the physical signs of a degenerate moral constitution that would predestine the indi-vidual to a life of crime—Lombroso’s ‘born criminal’—contemporary biocriminology “recognizes the exquisite complexity of human behavior and thus focuses on the various ways in which biological/genetic factors interface with environmental factors to produce differing propensities for antisocial behaviors” (Beaver & Walsh 2011: 5). Today’s biocriminology does not intend to identify the biological origins of crime in general, but instead uses probabilistic models to identify the complex patchwork of neurobiological risk factors associated to acts of violence and aggression.
How will this new biosocial criminology affect government responses to crime? As neuroscientific applications have only recently come to be applied in practice, much of this question is still uncertain. What is however clear, is that we are not presented with a kind of relapse to early-twentieth century eugenics. The field is shaped by an entirely dif-ferent set of questions and concerns. The practical applications referred to above indeed bear little resemblance to the crude practices inspired by early-twentieth century biocriminology (cf. Rafter et al. 2016). Yet at the same time it is evident that the lan-guage, methods and objects in this burgeoning new field present a break with post-war criminology. Its central problem is not primarily to find ways of identifying and correct
!10 the social, economic and cultural origins of crime through strategies of social welfare, neither is it simply to rehabilitate those individuals that unhappily entered a path of crime (cf. Garland 2001). Though biocriminological research seeks to investigate social conditions, we see that these questions are today reframed in a language of risk-control and security-management. Rather than targeting the unhappy individual who has em-barked on a path on crime, contemporary biocriminology revolves around the individual at risk through a strategy of screening, preemption and early intervention.
With this change in thought, then, there emerges a new way of acting upon crime, a new way of producing social order. Like the criminological thought that took precedence over the second half of the twentieth century, this new way of acting relates to a specific set of ideas about the nature of crime. This investigation is an attempt to describe the re-lations between a new way of thinking about crime and the practices to which it might give rise. At the center of the new approach to crime that is now developing we find the human nervous system, the brain. Through various new methods and techniques human neurobiology acquires a new social function: it becomes a thing upon which one may act to govern crime, something that was not possible roughly thirty years ago. How does one govern crime by acting on the brain? How has the brain been constituted as an object of crime control? This is the question we will be trying to answer throughout this study. By doing so we hope to bring a new perspective to ethical reflection on the practical imple-mentation of neuroscience. Needless to say we cannot see now what practical changes will be effected by current developments in criminological thought. Yet we may none-theless try to make explicit some of the key concepts structuring biosocial crime science and the practical applications to which it is expected to gives rise.
The central question is thus one of how. How has it become possible to govern crime through the brain? And to answer this question this study will begin by analyzing the concepts and methods organizing biosocial crime science. How does it conceptualize the brain? How does it conceptualize crime?
The first chapter of our investigation will deal with questions of method, using the empirical philosophy of science developed in the work of Canguilhem and Foucault as a point of departure. To look at a scientific field in relation to the practical organization of crime control arguably requires a degree of critical detachment with respect to its scien-tific results. If the facts produced in biological risk-factor research are treated simply as the results of a process of disinterested scientific discovery, the new forms of govern-ment it inspires would appear as the natural consequence of expanding knowledge, an instrumental application of newly discovered facts about the brain. In one sense this might be true, but it is also clear that it is in no way necessary to approach criminological research as a search for ‘neurobiological risk-factors of antisocial behavior and self-regu-lation.’ Constructs like antisociality, self-control and risk-factors, so the work of Can-guilhem shows, only exist within particular ‘intellectual environments:’ coherent systems of assumptions, ideas and instruments that organize research in local scientific disci-plines. Neurobiological risk only exists in a conceptual environment structured, as we will come to see, by a set of questions and concerns wholly foreign to the criminological enterprise as it developed after the Second World War and still exists today (Garland
2001). Such intellectual frameworks, so Foucault shows, are intricately related to specif-ic forms of social organization. They do not simply add entries to the storehouse of crim-inological facts, but instead imply a new ways of looking at and acting on a reality.
What is this new way of looking? How is the brain constituted as an object of crime science? What are the basic scientific problems confronting biosocial crime research? These empirical questions will be central to the third chapter of our investigation. Using Neuroscientific Applications as a point of departure we will investigate the basic con-cepts underlying biosocial research along three dimensions. First, we will enquire into the explanans of biocriminological research. What entities are called upon to explain its phenomena under investigation? How are these related to each other? Second, its ex-planandum: what does biosocial crime research seek to explain? How do these objects of explanation compare to the objects of criminal law and to the objects of sociologically-oriented criminology? Finally, we ask how biosocial explanation does in fact proceed. What is the core methodological approach that organizes research? Here we again use the sociological tradition of criminology as a point of reference.
If the new way of looking at crime that is being articulated in biosocial crime re-search relates to a new way of governing of crime, what are the actual practices that it makes possible? How is the brain constituted as an object of crime control, something one way act upon to control crime? This will be the main problem of the third chapter. After a brief excursion to the history of biological crime research in the Netherlands the third chapter will ask what forms of crime control are engendered by biosocial crime sci-ence. How does the brain become an object of political action? To answer this question we will engage with the concept of power developed in the later work of Michel Fou-cault. Foucault’s notion of power-relations as ‘action upon action’ is used to structure our investigation practices of biosocial crime control. As we will see this generally takes the form of stimulating ethical values of self-control throughout the neurobiological devel-opment of the individual. This is what we will call crime control through self-control.
Biosocial criminology does not exist in a social vacuum. It exist in a crime control landscape that, as most commentators agree, has undergone a rapid series of transforma-tions over the past three decades. Both in and outside the Netherlands crime control has become increasingly structured by notions of risk, prevention and security. How does the new biosocial crime science—its methods, concerns and questions—relate to this set of transformations? In the last chapter of this investigation we engage with the tripartite ty-pology of power developed in the later work of Foucault to characterize the broader en-vironment in which the brain comes to function as an object of crime control, using the Dutch context as our main point of reference.
Throughout the investigation the aim is to understand how the brain in is simultane-ously conceived as object of knowledge and object of political intervention. Or in other words to clarify relations between power and knowledge as they connect to the social significance of human neurobiology. To begin to do this, the following chapter will con-sider some questions of method. It must be emphasized that in enquiring into the emer-gence of the brain as an object of crime control, we are posing a peculiar type of empiri-cal problem. The central aim is not to describe a causal series of historiempiri-cal events leading up to the discovery of this or that neurobiological risk factor, only to be implemented in
!12 crime control policy afterwards. Our main concern is conceptual rather than historical: to outline the structure of the intellectual framework through which the brain has been con-stituted as an object of criminological discourse. The following chapter means to elabo-rate on this approach.
Central to this investigation is a question concerning the emergence of a new object of action. It asks how it has become possible to govern crime by acting on the brain, how the brain has been constituted as an object of crime control. The problem can be broken down into a further series of questions each of which in some way concerns the relation between science and government. What kind of neuroscientific knowledge makes it pos-sible to reduce crime? How does one produce such knowledge? Using what concepts and procedures? These questions carry us still further. On what conception of mind, brain and behavior does this type of knowledge depend? How do the crime control strategies suggested by biosocial crime research relate to this? And what sets these strategies off from earlier ways of governing crime?
In different ways all these questions enquire into the specific way in which the brain has presently emerged both as a political and as a scientific object. This confronts us with a problem that is at once philosophical, historical and sociological. It asks in what way a certain object exists presently and what conditions have made it possible for it to exist in this particular way, at present. It thus requires, on the one hand, an enquiry into the qualities, limits and conditions of possibility of a certain object and, on the other, an empirical analysis with the practical settings in which these qualities, limits and condi-tion of possibility are realized and acted upon.
What does it mean to investigate to investigate the ‘emergence’ of a new object? The problem may appear to be rather ill-posed at first. Despite certain historically contingent differences, after all, the structures and functions of the human brain have remained rela-tively constant throughout the evolutionary history of the homo sapiens, much like the lungs, the liver and the heart. It would seem more adequate to say that the thing that emerges or changes is not an object, the human brain, but rather the different ways in which this object has been studied, understood, approached—a process driven by the continuous improvement of technical instruments. If we want to understand how crime control directed at the brain became possible, our account should thus chart the historical development of knowledge and instruments concerning the brain. This type of account would account would look something like the one below.
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1.1 A brief history of the brain
Scientific concern with the brain has a long history. We find the first recorded mention of the brain on the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus dated 3000BC. This is an ancient Egypt-ian document believed to contain instructions for military surgeons (Wickens 2015). But if we take modern biocriminology as our point of departure, we could say that all at-tempts at knowing the brain prior to the nineteenth century were at best conjectural. If the body was thought to be relevant to man’s mental life at all, it was either the heart or the ‘four bodily humors’—phlegm, blood, black -or yellow bile—that attracted interest. Both these views were respectively propounded in Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine (Kandel 2000). And though Descartes famously speculated that a tiny organ in the brain called the pineal gland was ‘the seat of the soul,’ and there were some early attempts at anatomizing the brain, it was not until the start of the nineteenth century that systematic scientific knowledge of the brain began to take shape. In was in this peri-od that Galvani discovered the bioelectrical properties of nerves, that Broca’s lesion studies first localized the area of the brain responsible for speech functions and that Ramón y Cajal’s anatomical studies behind the microscope led to the discovery of the neuron as a discrete entity in the brain, disproving the then popular ‘reticular theory’ that imagined the brain as a single continuous network. The discovery of synaptic transmis-sion by Sherrington follows shortly afterwards (Ibid.).
The brain’s structure was slowly but steadily being uncovered, but it was only during start of the twentieth century that serious steps were being made in understanding how the brain relates to man’s mental life. New techniques for experimentally measuring and stimulating the brain now made it possible to localize speech, motor, sensory -and cogni-tive functions with a degree of certainty and precision (Roche et al. 2009). This process accelerated towards the middle of the twentieth-century, when the structure of DNA was discovered by Watson & Crick and new forms of psychopharmalogical intervention made it increasingly clear that mind is nothing other than the product of material pro-cesses in the brain, slowly but steadily putting an end to such fantastical illusions as ‘the free will’ or ‘the soul.’ A new paradigm for studying the human mind had begun to emerge.
Around the sixties we see a number of attempts to gather the various strands of brain science that had hitherto existed (e.g. neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, genetics) into a unified interdisciplinary field. Here F.O. Schmitt’s Neuroscience Research Programme—reportedly the first to use the name ‘neuroscience’—constitutes a particularly influential example (Swazey 1975; Abi-Rached & Rose 2013). These attempts at disciplinary unification proved to be very fruit-ful indeed, as is readily witnessed by an ever growing, ever refining body of knowledge concerned with relations between mind, brain and behavior. Roughly since the nineteen-nineties—which was christened the “decade of the brain by then president George H.W. Bush—neuroscience was beginning to affect various fields concerned with human thought and behavior (e.g. psychiatry, anthropology, economics, education, marketing, musicology, linguistics, social science), where new neuroscientific insights into the
hu-man mind promise to bring revolutionary advances (Pickersgill 2013). Entrenched pro-fessional ideologies against biological explanation of human conduct has slightly ham-pered the pace of progress in some of these fields, but it seems all too clear that the adop-tion of neuroscientific research methods will finally provide the human sciences with a reliable basis for future progress, especially since we are now seeing that neuroscientists are increasingly laying bare the interactions between the brain and its social environ-ment. So too crime science, where renewed attention to the role of the brain in producing criminal conduct promises an approach science “more rooted in science and empirical observation than in ideology,” finally putting an end to the theoretical standstill that had befallen on the sociologically oriented biocriminology that developed after the Second World War (Beaver & Walsh 2011; Wright & Cullen 2012).
This (decidedly brief) history of neuroscientific thought describes how the nature of the brain is progressively revealed through a more or less continuous line of discoveries and innovations. Of course it was painted with rather broad strokes, but the central message is clear: through the concerted efforts of a series of pioneers, heralds, precursors or fore-runners we arrive at our present-day conception of the brain. A continual refinement of concepts and techniques allowed our forebears to steadily overcome certain mythical ideas and misguided scientific theories, finally bringing a more objective paradigm to crime science. Knowledge produced here in term makes it possible to govern crime through the brain. This brain did not so much ‘emerge’ as a scientific object. What emerged was a new way of approaching it. Undeniably people have always concerned themselves with that ‘three-pound’ enigma residing within our skull (Moffett 2006). Rather than speaking of emergence or constitution, we should rather liken this process to a camera sharpening its focus. Again, the ‘how’ question central to this investigation ap-pears to be ill-posed. If we ask how the brain is constituted as an object of science it seems we are erroneously muddling questions of ontology—what are things, what is the brain—with questions of epistemology—what are the appropriate methods for knowing and studying things?
1.2 How to study the emergene of a scientific object?
It has often been noted that historical narratives of scientific development tend to be marked by a sense of heroism or triumph. Like our brief history of neuroscience, com-posed out of the many histories of neuroscience that have appeared over the past two decades, historical accounts of scientific objects or disciplines tend to evaluate the past from the vantage point of the present. Thus events resonating with our current scientific beliefs are treated as brilliant discoveries by daring pioneers—the great “minds behind the brain,” as one account calls them—where those rejected by current science are seen as errors in need of explanation (Finger 2000). This approach naturally results in an im-age of science history as a kind of progressive movement toward the present. Butterfield conceived this term to describe “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to
em-!16 phasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the rati-fication if not the glorirati-fication of the present.” (Butterfield 1931). With the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge in the nineteen-seventies this approach came to be widely criticized for producing an unrealistic image of scientific development. Writing in the wake of Kuhn’s publication The Structure of Scientific Revolutions many sociologists of science argued that the portrayal of science presented by such triumphalist narratives failed to live up to what scientists were actually doing in practice. Here one found no brilliant scientific pioneers operating in the scientific spirit ascribed to them in science history. Rather one found small groups of experts working on relatively esoteric prob-lems.
Here our aim is not to write a history of neuroscience. Instead we will be studying the particular way in which the brain has today been constituted as an object of crimino-logical discourse and the modes of crime control that correspond to it. But our brief for-ay into historical accounts of neuroscience holds a central lesson for the problem we are dealing with here, a lesson concerning the relation between ontology and epistemology in the philosophy of science. In his methodological writings, the French philosopher and historian of science George Canguilhem often reflected on the peculiar form of historiog-raphy so often encountered amongst historians of science. These reflections may serve to introduce the analysis of biosocial crime science taken up throughout this investigation.
Much like Butterfield, Canguilhem takes issue with triumphalist narratives of history. Such histories, he writes, are contaminated by what he describes as ‘the precursor virus’ (Canguilhem 1968/1994). “A precursor,” Canguilhem writes,
“…is a thinker whom the historian believes can be extracted from his cultural milieu and inserted into others. This procedure assumes that concepts, discourses, speculations and experiments can be shifted from one intellectual environment to another. Such adaptability, of course, is obtained at the cost of neglecting the “historicity” of the ob-ject under study.”
(Canguilhem 1968/1994: 50)
As an example Canguilhem points to the historical reception of Aristarchos of Samos. 3
Like Copernicus this ancient Greek astronomer theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun, a hypothesis that led Copernicus to speak of him as a forerunner in his De revo-lutionibus orbium coelestium. It would nevertheless be wrong to think of Aristarchus as “the ancient Copernicus,” as he was once described (Heath 1913). Both men took a wholly different interest in the Sun. Though Aristarchus indeed made very precise geo-metrical calculations of the Sun and the Earth’s relative sizes, and he even hypothesized that the stars in heaven are themselves distant suns, his observations were very much rooted in a Pythagorean astronomy that postulated that the earth revolves around a
Canguilhem is certainly not alone in his attention to Aristarchos of Samos. This figure has
3
come to present something of a critical case amongst science historians and their critics. In his
Anatomy of a Precursor: The Historiography of Aristarchus of Samos, Wall (1975) provides a
detailed overview of the numerous historical accounts developed around the figure of Aristar-chos, detailing the ways in which historians have commonly tried to explain how Aristarchos could have arrived at his heliocentrical model, and why this astronomical model was only ac-cepted centuries later.
tral Fire” that had to be central because the “worthiest place is appropriate to the worthi-est occupant, and fire is worthier than earth” (Heath 1913: 181). This system that also postulated the existence of an invisible tenth planet called the Counter-Earth because the number 10 was more perfect than 9 (Ibid.). Even if Copernicus himself cited this Greek astronomer as a forerunner, Canguilhem writes, it must be born in mind that Copernicus’ pure mathematical proof rejected both the geocentrical and heliocentrical astronomies that came before him because they lacked rational foundations (Canguilhem 1968/1994: 50). Such moral concepts as ‘worthiness’ or ‘perfection’ simply did not apply to the ob-jects of Copernicus’ concern. Aristarchus and Copernicus occupied a wholly different universe, in which a very different system norms, rules and procedures for developing knowledge held sway. The object to which their activities were oriented, the Sun, should be understood only in this context. If one does so, it is very difficult to maintain that both men were speaking of the same thing. Or at least not more than superficially anyhow. By glossing over this contextual definition of scientific knowledge histories of precursors present a form of historical enquiry that, to cite Canguilhem, conflates “science with its results and results with the form in which they happen to be expressed for pedagogical purposes at a particular point in time” (Ibid. 28).
Underlying Canguilhem’s historiographical critique is a particular approach to the philosophy of scientific knowledge. This approach contends that scientific objects can never be understood in isolation from the systems of thought in which they are articulat-ed. That is to say that ontological questions concerning the way things are and epistemo-logical questions concerning the ways things should be known can never be wholly sepa-rated in the philosophy of science. Rather they must be understood insofar as they relate to a more or less coherent body of ‘concepts, discourse, speculations and experiments’ (Ibid.). Precursory histories like the one we saw above fail to take this ‘epistemological historicity’ into account. Thus if one notes that ‘the ancient Copernicus’ had an early insight into the true nature of the planet’s relative motions, one reinterprets Aristarchus’ statements in the context of what we now consider scientifically appropriate and true, thus obscuring the coherent ontological and epistemological framework within which these statements had their meaning. This was an intellectual universe that aimed to reveal the isomorphic correspondences—analogies, resemblances, sympathies—between phenomena by appealing to the higher principles that structured the All (Yates 1964; Foucault 1966): if fire was worthier than earth, or 10 was more important than 9, this re-lation should also be reflected in the spatial arrangement of the cosmos.
Canguilhem’s critique of ‘the precursor virus’ urges us to take up a more ‘systematic’ approach to scientific knowledge, giving particular attention to the underlying rules and concepts that govern the way objects are conceived, rather than compiling a history of scientific results and academic biographies. To get a sense of the approach advocated by Canguilhem it might be illustrative to identify the principles according to which the ob-ject of precursory histories is articulated. This approach is rooted in the positivist episte-mology operative in the natural sciences. Scientific knowledge is here broadly under-stood as the objective description of natural phenomena through a strict adherence to the facts of sensory experience. These experiential data (and the natural objects that produce
!18 them) remain constant, whereas our ways of describing or interpreting the data may be subject to historical change. Within this intellectual framework, precursory history traces a historical development towards ever greater objectivity of our interpretation—an ever greater correspondence between sensory data produced by natural objects and our law-like descriptions of the causal patterns we may infer from them. Scientific development therefore consists in steadily ruling out the subjectivity distorting our representations of the way things are in themselves—perspective, interests, culture, bias, prejudice and so forth. History thus works towards a ‘view from nowhere,’ as Nagel describes it in his 1986 book of the same title (Nagel 1986).
This conception of knowledge is related to a conception of how knowledge might be practically attained. Objective knowledge is acquired by systematically cancelling out the inherent subjectivity of one’s spontaneous representations of the empirically given world. The procedures characteristic of modern science—technically aided measure-ment, controlled experimental observation—are precisely means for keeping such sub-jectivity in check; and because the linguistic categories we unreflectively use to describe our experience always already imply a form of subjective interpretation, the ‘pure’ quan-titative language of mathematics constitutes the most neutral medium for describing pat-terns of sensory data (Shapin & Shaffer 1985; Daston & Gallison 2007). Again related to this is a certain conception of the standards of knowledge. As nothing beyond that which is objectively given by the senses exists with any certainty, the ultimate criterion of sci-entific knowledge lies in its ability to predict patterns of sensory data using law-like gen-eralizations. In sum, then, the positivist epistemology of natural science conceives of knowledge and its object in separation from each other: the object of knowledge is given in the natural world, the subject of knowledge enters into an ever closer contact with it, precisely by cancelling out his subjectivity through various linguistic and technical pro-cedures. By doing so objects in the natural world are adequately represented on the basis of what is given in experience, with adequacy being tested through predictive power.
Thus we begin to see how the precursory history rests on an intellectual framework in which ontology, epistemology and methodology are related to each other in a coherent way. The particular way it articulates its object—the historical development of knowl-edge concerning a natural object that exists independently of our way of knowing it— may be seen as a kind of historical projection of these positivist principles. Our brief his-tory of neuroscience illustrated how such projection plays out. The brain’s true nature is gradually revealed through a series of discoveries, a steady refinement of concepts and techniques. Speculations, traditions and other limitations are overcome in favor of that which can be established objectively on the basis of the data. And because truth is con-ceived as a correspondence between representations and the way things are in them-selves, external to scientific discourse, precursory history may draw transhistorical con-nections between statements uttered for entirely different reasons, on the basis of entirely different questions, using incongruous methods.
True statements are thus, to use Canguilhem’s terminology, ‘stripped from their his-toricity,’ their system of production, for their truth derives exclusively from their corre-spondence to natural objects. This correcorre-spondence is self-explanatory: if Aristarchos propounded heliocentrism, if Ramón y Cajal conceptualized the brain in terms of
neu-rons, it could only have been because their theories corresponded to the data; if Galen, on the other hand, believed that human temperament derived from four humors, the falsi-ty of this statement could very well be explained to its socio-historical context.
A certain asymmetry is thus found in the study of scientific ideas. To resolve such asymmetry by studying scientific objects as relative to historically variant systems of thought, incommensurable with each other in many respects, would be to break the rules governing the positivist framework; for this would be to imply that truth is relative to something else than the way things are in themselves, which would be to discard the possibility of knowledge altogether. And so any truth-claim that does not correspond to our current ideas about what is real—e.g. the soul, free will, humors—must be explained as error, illusion, obstacle.
Here we are concerned with the emergence of the brain as an object of criminology and the crime control practices it informs. This is an object of a very much contemporary concern, so why bother with Canguilhem’s methodological remarks on the history of sci-ence at such length? The answer to this lies in the wider philosophical significance of Canguilhem’s critique of ‘the precursor virus.’ The significance of Canguilhem’s diagno-sis of the precursor virus not primarily historiographical, but epistemological. It entails a particular approach to the philosophy of science. According to this approach one cannot understand how scientific knowledge emerges by taking a fully formed conception of a scientific object, complete with the ontology it entails, as a point of departure. If we want to analyze how the brain has emerged object of crime science we cannot do so by assum-ing that the scientific objects to which such science is oriented—say, risk-factors of anti-social behavior—always already existed in nature. For it is only after a particular ap-proach to reality achieves widespread recognition that we are able to say that this object always already existed as a natural object—a process Canguilhem describes as ‘retroac-tive validtation.’ We confuse the result of a process of scientific objectification with the cause of its emergence.
Let us use an example to show what this error of ‘retroactive validation’ consists in. Say we argue that the experiential states the Babylonians interpreted as divine inspira-tion, were really just fits op epileptic brain disorder. amongst the Babylonian epileptic brain disorder. If epilepsy already existed amongst the Babylonians it is only reasonable that we should discover it. And who would want to deny that epilepsy exists as a natural phenomenon, with certain symptoms and a certain etiology. How could scientific instru-ments otherwise consistently measure cerebral similarities between persons with certain clusters of symptoms? Of course no one would want to deny these things. But as Can-guilhem argues, the natural world is not built of discrete scientific objects; nothing in na-ture forces us to rank the external phenomena characteristic of epileptic brain disorder as a disorder, as symptoms and so forth. They acquire their status as such within a medical system bent on classifying external phenomena as deriving from an internal cause as well as imposing a medical taxonomy on these different orders of symptoms.
Scientific discourse, however truthful, cannot be seen simply as a disinterested repre-sentation of reality. It is, according to Canguilhem, rather a certain way of systematically translating certain elements of experience into testable hypotheses that may be
synthe-!20 sized theoretically. It consists of definitions, problem formulations, domains of objects, postulations. None of these things are ever encountered in experience. Canguilhem ar-gues that the central task of the philosophy of science is to analyze how sciences con-struct objects out of experience, through what methods, principles and concepts different scientific fields constitute the objects to which they are oriented. That is to say one should abstain from seeing the objects to which this or that scientific field is oriented as being revealed, discovered or observed. For this way of speaking is only retroactively available, after a sense of agreement over the proper way of objectifying has been reached.
Working from this perspective one finds that different scientific fields indeed formu-late their objects in rather different ways. What counts as an object for physics scarcely does so for psychology (Canguilhem 1968). Rather than attempting to reveal the ideal norms of scientific procedure by reference to a particular set of epistemological ideals, then, Canguilhem argues that the philosophy of scientific knowledge should take upon itself to analyze empirically by what rules objects are articulated in local scientific fields, how different sciences constitute their object. The history of science stands in service of this task. Canguilhem’s views on the history of science open out on an empirically in-formed approach to the philosophy of science (Gutting 1989). Here one’s questions are are empirical to the extent that one seeks to map out how methods, concepts and ques-tions change to produce new types of scientific objects in local scientific projects, rather than unearthing the ideal principles of science through philosophical introspection (or interpreting history on their basis). Yet they are simultaneously epistemological inas-much as they concern systems that define how true statements come to be produced. That is to say that the production of real objects is conceived and studied as a practical activity, expressed in more or less coherent ‘systems of thought.’
To do this one should, as it were, methodically ‘take a step back,’ become an outsider to one’s own beliefs and try to imagine that the objects to which science is oriented are not the things we encounter in everyday experience, that the objects of science are not self-evidently natural objects. As a methodological principle one should try to assume that the objects to which scientific activity is oriented did not have to appear in their cur-rent form out of strict necessity. Clearly such an outsider’s position can never fully real-ized. Yet what one can achieve is an attitude of uncertainty with respect to the objects under investigation in question. An attitude skepticism, if you will, stimulating one to look at the way the results of scientific research are produced anew. In discussing the de-velopment of crystallography, Canguilhem notes that this attitude of uncertainty is an es-sential methodological element of the empirically informed philosophy of science he ad-vocates:
“Because “crystal” is in some sense independent of the scientific dis-course that seeks to obtain knowledge about it, we call it a natural object. Of course, this natural object, external to discourse, is not a scientific ob-ject. Nature is not given to us as a set of discrete scientific objects and phenomena. Science constitutes its objects inventing a method of formu-lating through propositions capable of being combined integrally a theo-ry controlled by a concern with proving itself wrong. (…) The histotheo-ry of
science is the explicit, theoretical recognition of the fact that the sciences are critical, progressive discourses for determining what aspects of expe-rience must be taken as real. The object of the history of science is there-fore a non-given, an object whose incompleteness is essential.”
(Canguilhem 1968/1994: 26-8, my italics)
If one tries to take up this approach to science, tries to shake one’s idea that science has a direct contact with nature and treats the object of science as a non-given, a new set of questions begins to appear. One no longer asks how an object—like the neurobiological risk-factors of anti-social behavior—was finally laid bare through series of pioneering discoveries, to be implemented in the domain of crime control subsequently. While this way of thinking may be part and parcel of science itself, it cannot function as a guiding principle to philosophical epistemology. Rather one’s questions take a constitutive turn: how does one arrive at a scientific object like the neurobiological risk-factors for anti-behavior? What concepts govern this way of formulating the problem? Through what forms of measurement does one arrive at these notions? What elements of human life are given special attention and in what way? How did people start to think of brains in these terms? The perspective shifts, we could say, from discovery to constitution, from results to conditions and from objects to objectification. It is a perspective in which questions of ontology—questions concerning what exists—are treated as inseparable from questions of epistemology—questions concerning the proper ways of attaining knowledge.
Under the rubric of ‘genealogy’ Michel Foucault, a student of Canguilhem’s, would fur-ther expand this type of ‘constitutive history’ beyond the domain of science to include any object of thought and action. Foucault, as will later be discussed at greater length, was particularly interested in the practices of objectification directed at human beings— their thoughts, activities, feelings, desires, behavior, language and so forth (Foucault 1982). Fields like economy, linguistics, psychology or sociology not only entailed a new way of thinking about human beings, but established a new field of possible action: new ways of organizing labor relations, new ways of knowing an acting on the human mind, new ways of acting on large-scale statistical patterns. With the constitution of new types of scientific objects, then, it became possible to act on such thing as ‘labor,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘sanity’ and so forth.’
At the same time the emergence of these scientific objects was contingent upon the rise of numerous social arrangements concerned with human conduct: prisons, schools, hospitals, madhouses, factories, professional armies, charity houses and so forth (Fou-cault 1975d). It is only in this context of state institutions that scientific experts began to be concerned with question concerning, for instance, the most optimal way of organizing factory life, how to measure intelligence, what the best method’s for correcting prison-er’s are, how scarcity could be kept in check through economic regulations or which types of mental illness require which type of treatment. Institutions like these provided a necessary condition to the development of aforementioned knowledge about human be-ings. But the reverse is also true: historically, the development of expert knowledge about human beings has been an essential element in the organization of such social arrangements as compulsory education or the penal domain. Thus Foucault argues that to
!22 understand how such human activities as ‘labor,’ ‘punishment,’ ‘intelligence’ or ‘sanity’ were constituted as objects of scientific knowledge, we must look beyond the domain of science proper, seeing scientific work as a practical activity inextricably tied to questions of social organization and power. Thus he writes that…
“…we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should rather admit that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by apply-ing it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply another; that there is no power relation without the correlative consti-tution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not pre-suppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”
(Ibid. 27)
For Foucault, then, questions of power are integral to our understanding of scientific knowledge. Power produces knowledge and vice versa. To describe this essential inter-connection Foucault coins the notion of ‘power-knowledge’ (pouvoir-savoir). Now to those who believe that ‘the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge,’ the thesis that power is a necessary condition to the production of scientific knowledge may appear rather skeptical towards the possibility of true objective knowledge. Power is driven by interests where we ideally think of science as being disinterested. Yet as the this assertion must be understood in the wider context of Foucault’s conception of power, which we will deal with later. Of interest to the methodological question we are dis-cussing here—how should we investigate the emergence of a new type of object?—is that Foucault’s work on this topic urges us to widen the scope of constitutive history, looking beyond the domain of science proper. One must situate scientific knowledge with respect to the social arrangement in which such knowledge is functionally relevant. Within this approach the question whether science is interested or disinterested is simply irrelevant.
With his approach to power-knowledge Foucault meant to create a philosophical framework that could account for the scientific objectification of human subjectivity. It means to account for the emergence of categories we use to make sense of ourselves (and others) as subjects—e.g. rationality, mental illness, citizenship, criminality, sexuali-ty and so forth—without positively assuming from the outset that these concepts reflect ‘natural’ facts about human beings that can be discovered through strict empirical obser-vation. Both science and its objects are rather understood as part of historically specific formations of ‘power-knowledge’ organized around a set of goals, assumptions and rules (Ibid.).
Foucault’s interest in subjective categories like the ones described above is part of a more general philosophical project. For Foucault one of the central questions of philoso-phy—who are we as human beings—must necessarily take on a socio-historical dimen-sion, for the categories we use to make ourselves (e.g. sex, gender, rationality or individ-uality) function with respect to certain social formations of power-knowledge. Analo-gous to Canguilhem’s approach to scientific facts, Foucault understands subjective cate-gories as products of certain modes of subjectification. Science is only one domain in
which human categories arise and are disseminated, albeit a particularly important one in Western societies. The subject, for Foucault, is a result of practices of power and knowl-edge, rather than its origin. In a 1975 interview Foucault thus describes his method as an attempt to analyze…
…how problems of constitution could be resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring them back to a constituent object (madness, criminality or whatever). (…) One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to ar-rive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealo-gy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.
(Foucault 1975: 117)
A form of history, then, that means to account for constitution of forms of thought and action we presently deem natural. It enquires into the conditions underlying systems of knowledge, practices, discourses, categories or objects we now deem necessary by ‘tak-ing a step back,’ without assum‘tak-ing our current system of knowledge necessarily corre-sponds to the way things are. It is in this attempted break of self-evidence that Foucault’s approach to the relations between science and society mirrors Canguilhem’s descriptive approach to the philosophy of science.
In Discipline & Punish, to give an example close to the theme of this investigation, Foucault investigates the rise of a new style of punishing that is directed at correcting or reforming the criminal mind, rather than punishing the crime in a spectacular public dis-play of sovereign power over the body. With the development of more lenient ways of punishing from the seventeenth century onwards, Foucault describes, arose a scientific concern with classifying and treating the origins of classes of criminal behavior. Rather than punishing the act in public, that is, it suddenly became important to know what was its origin, why it was committed, how this criminal should be punished and so forth. The appearance of this modern style of punishment, Foucault notes, is often seen as an ele-ment in the progressive civilization of society’s vengeful response to legal transgression: “less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’” (Foucault 1975d: 16).
This mode of historical interpretation runs parallel to the ‘precursory approach’ to historiography discussed above: elements of our current penal rationale are treated as the cause of their own emergence, with historical events steadily converging toward our present notions of punishment. Such an approach obscures the fact that knowing and cor-recting the criminal mind was simply irrelevant in a system centered on asserting the dominance of royal power through dramatic displays of corporeal punishment. Its main objectives were never framed in terms of correction, rehabilitation or reform. But as Foucault shows, medieval practices of punishment were by no means brutish. They were structured according to sophisticated set of rules governing criminal investigation,
tor-!24 ture and the assignment of corporeal punishment to the proper crime. The structural change in penal practice and philosophy that emerged in the seventeenth century was not simply a humanization of a barbarian practice; it was correlated to a wholesale revision of ideas concerning human nature, crime and the purpose of punishment. Individuals were suddenly conceived as subjects naturally endowed with certain rights to wealth and freedom. It was this incorporeal subjectivity, in need of being corrected, rehabilitated and cured, that came to function as the target of punishment. Scientific interest in knowing and correcting the criminal mind only came to be regarded as helpful and even necessary to criminal justice in this context. Punishment, that is, was no longer directed at the crime as an infraction of the law, but rather came to be directed at the criminal mind. Foucault’s approach, here introduced through the work of his mentor Canguilhem, thus opens out on a particular approach to scientific knowledge. In the most general terms this perspective requires on to investigate how a particular type of scientific objectification— criminological discourse directed at the brain, in our case—relates to the society in which it emerges. How do its fundamental problems and concerns relate to wider institu-tional arrangements? Does the need for this new science correspond to a more general change in our approach to crime? If so, what new forms of action on crime does the new biocriminology make possible? How does it restructure the way in which crime is gov-erned in contemporary society? It is questions like these that will be discussed in the fol-lowing three chapters.
* * *
The past three decades have witnessed the emergence of a new approach to human be-ings in criminological discourse. Increasingly, as we will see later, criminological dis-course is today framed in terms of risk, security, prevention and control (Garland 2001). It seems the brain is now taking center stage in this process: once again ‘the three-pound enigma’ is coming to function as an object amenable to government. It is thereby acquir-ing a new social function As we will see, the conceptual framework in which this object appears has little in common with the eugenicist biocriminology that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless it is not simply criminology as usual. Throughout the rest of this investigation we will ask, then, how the brain is today consti-tuted as an object of crime control and criminal justice. What makes it possible to control crime by acting on the brain? What are the scientific concepts and procedures guiding this activity? How do these relate to the way crime is governed in contemporary society? We are, in short, attempting to map out the intellectual landscape in which human neuro-biology has appeared as an object of crime governance.
Answering these types of questions may bring a new ethical perspective to the emer-gence of biosocial criminology, one that is able to go beyond studying the ‘ethical con-siderations’ referenced in each chapter of Neuroscientific Applications. In the report we see that the need to test the potential applications it suggests against extant ethico-legal concerns is repeatedly emphasized. Examples of such ethical considerations concern, for
instance, the desirability of prenatal screening, the risk of stigmatizing those biologically at risk or the privacy concerns related to collecting biological data (NA 2016). Now while it is certainly worth testing novel applications against extant ethical principles, a somewhat different conception of ethics underlies the approach taking up here. This proach is not so much directed toward seeing what rules might be broken by new ap-plications, but rather with making explicit the form of life entailed by the governmental strategies and techniques developed in the new approach to crime that we are now see-ing. Bluntly speaking this new form of government, one may today recognize in many fields of governmental action, is organized around the individual’s capacity (and respon-sibility) to govern, regulate or control him or herself; government here consists increas-ingly consists in supplying individuals with values aligned to those of various govern-mental aims—e.g. responsible financial conduct, healthy conduct, social conduct—while steering those who fail to conduct themselves responsibly in the right direction. A new form of life, related to new conceptions of selfhood, citizenship and identity, seems to be taking shape. This approach to ethics is less about testing whether specific applications do or do not correspond to an extant body of ethical principles, but rather about making explicit the organizational axes of a new way of living.
Before going into this, however, an outline of the main concepts and procedures that structure contemporary biocriminology is structured is needed. For this purpose we will now consider a recent research report by the scientific research centre of the Dutch de-partment of Justice and Security, Neuroscientific Applications in the Juvenile Criminal Justice System. This survey of practically oriented biocriminological research was men-tioned toward the introduction of this chapter. Of course it comprises only a small ele-ment in the integration of neurobiological knowledge in systems of criminal justice, yet it is of special interest to our purposes: the report is explicitly focused on the practical uses of extant biocriminological research for purposes of crime control Thus it is situated at the interface between science and policy. Doubtlessly it comprises only one of many points of transaction between research and practice, but one could see its main lines of reasoning reflected in any of numerous articles arguing for a biosocial approach to crime control. To understand, then, how the brain is constituted as an object of crime control, the following chapter we will therefore map out the intellectual framework that organizes biosocial crime research.
2. The biosocial puzzle
What are the central questions, concepts and methods organizing biosocial crime re-search? The authors of Neuroscientific Applications provide an answer to this question in the first part of their report, where they give a general overview of the current state of the field. An interdisciplinary field, it becomes clear that biocriminology concerns a wide range of phenomena found on multiple levels of observation—ranging from the molecu-lar to the behavioral. In the same field you will encounter measurements of heartbeat pat-terns, empathy, gene sequences, attention, stress and hormonal concentrations. Naturally such an extensive domain of objects brings with it a diverse collection of research in-struments: brain imaging methods, neuropsychological tests, cerebrospinal fluid punc-tures, animal experiments and much more. Following Canguilhem we could say each ac-quires their significance in a different intellectual environment: whereas the animal ex-periment derives its validity from similarities between humans and non-humans owing to a shared evolutionary ancestry, a neuropsychological test derives its value from a body of knowledge associating this or that cognitive task to a specific part of the brain through repeated experimental association. Neither of the two stands on its own. And this may be said of measurement in general: tools and experiments arguably acquire their validity only in the context of theories that led to their construction.
Looking at measurement in this way, as embodiments of bodies of acquired knowl-edge, one is confronted with the sheer variety of research instruments used in biocrimi-nology, particularly since the scope of biosocial research extends well-beyond the limits of the individual human body. Centrally the field seeks to understand how biology and environment interact to bring forth violent, aggressive and anti-social behavior. It there-fore includes group-level constructs like peer-pressure, childhood maltreatment or socio-economic status. Throughout the report the message that knowledge of neurobiological mechanisms can only hope to provide one dimension of the complex etiology of criminal behavior is often repeated. Such knowledge, the authors of the report write, ‘may be viewed as one of the pieces of the puzzle, just as knowledge about psychological and so-cial factors’ (NA 2016: 197, my italics).
In many ways the puzzle metaphor is significant. Biosocial theorists are often keen to emphasize the integrative nature of their discipline, its ability to unify data collected
This figure provides a highly schematic illustration of the relations between objects of biocriminology. Areas of interest in the domains of research identified in Neuroscientific
Applications are indicated by numbers 1 to 6. Some examples of relevant empirical objects
are given for each domain. The central nervous system (CNS) is the source of behavior. Here the most basic analytical unit is the neuron (indicated by a dot). Neurons communicate information both through electrical and chemical neurotransmission (3). Specific mental functions are performed by localized areas of neurons whose size and activity can be measured to make inferences about mental functions (1). The CNS communicates with
autonomous nervous system (ANS), which regulates numerous bodily processes (5), and the endocrine system, which produces and secretes hormones directly affecting brain function
(4). Neuropsychology studies the relation between brain activity and mental processes like cognition, emotion, perception, creating a bridge between neurobiology and psychology (2). Heritable genetic traits partially determine each element of an individual’s neurobiological constitution (6). What genes come to expression on the level of the phenotype is in part determined by environmental influences (e.g. nutrition, experiences, parental care, physical exercise). Indeed many elements of the human nervous system are plastic, shaped by numerous environmental influences over the course of life e.g. substances, childhood maltreatment, peer influences, nutritional patterns and so forth. Neurobiological structures may be strengthened or weakened through socially induced experience. This plasticity of human biology decreases over time, with plasticity piquing in the first three years of life.
