Abstract
The cover of the November, 1992, issue of the Journal of NIH Research shows a howling rhesus monkey clinging to a tree. However, the story inside is not about rhesus monkeys. Rather, it deals with the “Violence Initiative” of the United States government’s Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health.1 The Violence Initiative is a $400 million program designed to apply the tools of biology — particularly organic psychiatry and behavior genetics — to potential criminals, especially black and Latino youth in America’s inner cities. Dr. Frederick Goodwin, in 1992 the head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, described the Violence Initiative as “a public health approach to violence,” that focused on screening out and treating preventively “violence-prone individuals.”2 According to Goodwin, various studies within the context of the Violence Initiative aim “to design and evaluate psychosocial, psychological, and medical interventions for at-risk children before they become labeled as delinquent or criminal. This is the basic point of it all... identifying at-risk kids at a very early age before they have become criminalized.”3 According to Goodwin, this is a public health, or medical, approach to the recurrent problem of violence in our society. Estimated by some to comprise a population of 100,000 or more, such at-risk children come predominantly from what Goodwin calls “high-impact urban areas.” Goodwin claims that targeted groups would include those in the inner city, families in which the parents (or other custodial adults) have a low income and a low educational level, or female-headed households — all synonyms, of course, for poor, urban, African-American (or in some areas, Hispanic-American) populations.
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Notes and References
Nancy Touchette, “Cowering Inferno: Clearing the Smoke on Violence Research,” Journal of NIH Research 4 (November 1992), pp. 31–33.
Frederick K. Goodwin, “Conduct Disorder as a Precursor to Adult Violence and Substance Abuse: Can the Progression be Halted?” address to the American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C., May 5, 1992. Recorded by Mobile Tape Co., Inc., 25061 West Avenue, Stanford, Suite 70, Valencia, CA 91355; see also report of Goodwin’s remarks in the Washington Post, July 29, 1992, Metro Section, B1.
Ibid.
Goodwin, in speech to National Mental Health Advisory Council, February 11, 1992; see “Partial Transcript of a Draft to the National Mental Health Advisory council,” unpublished transcript.
For examples of current work underscoring the complexity of primate behaviors (including the rhesus monkey, Macaca mulatto), see Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wasserman, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, ed., Primate Societies (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987); especially useful is a chapter on the problems of comparing primate and human behavior: Robert A. Hinde, “Can Nonhuman Primates Help Us Understand Human Behavior?” Chapter 33, p. 421.
Goodwin, in speech to National Mental Health Advisory Council.
Ibid.
Goodwin, “Conduct Disorders...”.
Ibid.
Peter R. Breggin, “The Violence Initiative” — a Racist Biomedical Program for Social Control,” The Rights Tenet (Summer 1992) p. 3; see also Peter R. Breggin and Ginger Ross-Breggin, “A Biomedical Programme for Urban Violence Control in the U.S.: The dangers of Psychiatric Social Control, Changes (March 1993), 59-71, especially p. 63; Peter R. Breggin. Toxic Psychiatry (New York., St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
See, for example, “A Cure for Violence?” Los Angeles Times, April 24,1992, p. E-l, 4; “Hunting,” San Francisco Weekly, July 15, 1992, pp. 2-3; “Science and Sensitivity: Primates, Politics and the Sudden Debate over the Origins of Human Violence,” Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p. C-3; “New Storm Brews on Whether Crime Has Roots in Genes,” New York Times, September 15, 1992, p. C-l; “U.S. Hasn’t Given up Linking Genes to Crime” (Letters to the Editor), New York Times, September 18, 1992, p. A-34; “Study to Quell Violence Is Racist, Critics Charge,” Detroit Free Press, November 2, 1992, pp. 1, 11A; “Study Cites Biology’s Role in Violent Behavior,” New York Times, November 13, 1992, p. A-12.
Goodwin, interviewed on WAMU Radio, Washington D.C., July 22, 1992.
Touchette, “Cowering Inferno…” p. 32.
New York Times, March 8, 1992, p. 34.
Touchette, “Cowering Inferno...” p. 31.
Christopher Anderson, “NIH, Under Fire, Freezes Grant for Conference on Genetics and Crime,” Nature 358, July 30, 1992, p. 357; see also David Wasserman’s response to the cancellation of the conference, “In Defense of a Conference on Genetics and Crime: Assessing the Social Impact of Public Debate,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 1991, p. A-44.
W. Wayt Gibbs, “Seeking the Criminal Element,” Scientific American, 272, March, 1995, pp. 100–109, especially p. 106.
Breggin and Ross-Breggin, “A Biomedical Programme...,” pp. 59-62.
Ibid., p. 62.
Statistics from Newsweek (June 14, 1993): p. 32.
James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1985).
See, for example, Richard J. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson, “Are Criminals Made or Born,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 1985,31; “Genetic Traits Predispose Some to Criminality: A Conversation with James Q. Wilson, “U.S. News and World Report, February 10, 1986, p. 67; Also, Wilson was interviewed extensively on National Public Radio (NPR) and other information stations during the months immediately following publication of Crime and Human Nature, despite the fact that it was reviewed adversely by prominent psychologists and sociologists including: Leon J. Kamin, Scientific American, 254 February 1986, pp. 22-27; and J.P. Scott, Social Biology, 34, (Nos. 3-4, 198), pp. 256-265. The popular press continued to present the findings as “new” and important evidence for a significant genetic factor in crime.
Fox Butterfield, “Study Cites Biology’s Role in Violent Behavior,” New York Times, November 13, 1992, p. A–12.
Gregory Carey, “Genetics and Violence,” eds. Albert J. Reiss, Laus A. Milzek, and Jeffrey Roth, Understanding and Preventing Violence, volume 2 (Washington, D.C. National Academy Press, 1994, pp. 21–58.
The recent studies are still unpublished but are summarized in the New York Times, January 31, 1992, p. A-l; Earlier studies by Beck have been published as reports of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
New York Times, January 31, 1992, p. A–l.
Letters to the Editor, New York Times, February 14, 1992.
H.G. Brunner, M.R. Nelen, P. van Zandvoort, N.G.G.M. Abeling, A.H. van Gennip, E.C. Wolters, M.A. Kuiper, H.H. Ropers, and B.A. van Dost, “X-Linked Borderline Mental Retardation with Prominet Behavioral Disturbance: Phenotype, Genetic Localization, and Evidence for Disturbed Monamine Metabolism,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 52 (1993), pp. 1032–1039; see also, H.G. Brunner, M. Nelen, X.O. Breakefield, H.H. Ropers, B.A. van Dost, “Abnormal Behavior Associated with a Point Mutation in the Structural Gene for Monamine Oxidase A,” Science, 262, OXr 22, 1993, pp. 578-580.
Steven Rose, “The Rise of Neurogenetic Determination,” Nature, 373, February 2, 1995, p. 380.
Sheryl Strolberg, “Researchers Link Gene to Aggression,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1992, p. A–36.
See John Horgan, “Genes and Crime,” Scientific American, 268, February 1993, p. 26.
Daniel E. Koshland, “The Rational Approach to the Irrational” (Editorial), Science, 250, October 12, 1990, p. 189.
Diane B. Paul, Controlling Heredity. Daniel J. Kevles. In the Name of Eugenics (New York Random House, 1985); M.B. Adams ed., The Wellborn Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Garland E. Allen, “Eugenics and American Social History,” Genome, 31 (1989) pp. 885-889; and Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London MacMillan & Co., 1883), pp. 24–25.
Garland E. Allen. “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor: An Essay in Institutional History, Osiris, New Series 5 (1986), pp. 225–264.
Estimates by H.M. Boies, Prisoners and Paupers (New York Putnam’s, 1893), p. 10, in Philip Reilly, The Surgical Solution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 17.
Reilly, The Surgical Solution, p. 17.
Ibid.
See, for example, Charles B. Davenport, “Crime, Heredity and Environment,” Journal of Heredity, 19, July 1928,: pp. 307–313.
See, for example, the mimeographed pamphlet, “The Biological Basis of Crime” (1929); no author given but containing numerous quotations from Judge Olson and written in the informal, somewhat careless style typical of Laughlin. Numerous copies of the pamphlet were found in the H.H. Laughlin Papers, Pickler Memorial Library, Northeast Missouri State University, Kirksville, Missouri. I am proceeding on the grounds that Laughlin was the primary author but probably collaborated to a considerable extent with Olson.
Ibid. (Frontispiece).
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., passim.
Ibid., p. 9.
On the Immigration Restriction League and the growing nativist sentiment in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, see Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); See also Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 2nd ed., 1973); See also John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Athenaeum, 1966).
Allen Chase, The Legacy of Malthus (New York Basic Books, 1977),: p. 255; see also Charles Leinenweber, “The Class and Ethnic Bases of New York City Socialism, 1904-1915,” Labor History, 22 (1982), pp. 31-56.
Frances Hassencahl, “Harry H. Laughlin, Expert Eugenics Agent for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 1921 to 1931” Doctoral Dissertation; Case Western Reserve University 1972; Cleveland. See also Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); See also Garland E. Allen, “The Role of Experts in Scientific Controversy,” in H.T. Engelhardt and A.L. Caplan, eds., Scientific Controversies: Case Studies in the Resolution and Closure of Disputes in Science (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 183.
Allen Chase, The Legacy of Malthus, pp. 274–295.
Reilly, The Surgical Solution, p. x.
Harry H. Laughlin. “Further Studies on the Historical and Legal Development of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” American association on Mental Deficiency, 41 (1936), pp. 96–110.
Ibid., p. 107 (Fig. 2).
See summary of sterilization data in Reilly, The Surgical solution, p. 97; for the post-1941 figure, see p. 165.
Paul A. Lombardo, “Three Generations of Imbeciles Is Enough: New light on Buck vs Bell,” New York University Law Review, 60 (1985), pp. 30–62. Much of Laughlin’s and the other “expert” witnesses, testimony is summarized in Harry H. Laughlin, The Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization (Chicago: The Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1929), especially pp. 21-29.
Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office…,” p. 253.
Robert Proctor, Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1988); Benno, Müller-Hill, Murderous Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
Laughlin and Olson, “The Biological Basis of Crime,” p. 5.
Reilly, The Surgical Solution, pp. 91, 93-94, 101.
Lombardo, “Three Generations of Imbeciles…,” p. 97.
Steven Rose, “The Rise of Neurogenetic Determinism,” pp. 380–382.
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Allen, G.E. (1999). Modern Biological Determinism. In: Fortun, M., Mendelsohn, E. (eds) The Practices of Human Genetics. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4718-7_1
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