The Return of Lombroso? Ethical Aspects of (Visions of) Preventive Forensic Screening

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

The vast majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, almost all males, who have an early onset of violent criminality and display substance use problems, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality. These findings support the provision of far-reaching interventions among young individuals who have committed one or two violent crimes and are at risk of developing persistent violent criminal behavior. (Falk et al., 2014: 569) One may thus envision further development of this approach to meeting the a-c conditions, by focusing exclusively on traits that distinguish offenders from non-offenders, one-time offenders from repeating offenders, non-violent offenders from violent offenders and so on-traits which should also be reliably detectable and possible to manipulate in a controlled way. What sort of detection (how early? how general?) will be allowed will then depend on what candidates are found to work (the researchers in the above quote are quite cautious in this respect). Of course, any candidate for P thus identified would have to be assessed in further intervention studies. But the point is that any such candidate may then prove effective, even if the issue of the causation of crime, criminal recidivism, gravity of offenses, and so on, remains unclear. 10 In particular, based on the studies just referred to, this scenario looks most promising regarding persistent and violent criminality. About 70% of the small group who are responsible for the majority of violent crimes have displayed early onset of violent criminality, having met criteria for conduct disorder, subsequently with antisocial personality disorder (Falk et al., 2014) , and have shown patterns of aggressive behaviour since early in life, combined with a lack of behavioural control, hyperactivity and difficulties interacting with others (Moffitt et al., 2002; Hofvander et al., 2009) . Based on these data, it can be assumed that even small treatment effects in this group with persistent aggressive behaviour have the potential to prevent tens of percents of grave violent crime. Furthermore, using an early onset of antisocial aggressive behaviour (in childhood) as F, will make the detection of F less problematic from a methodological standpoint.