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

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

Another aspect of particular importance is the role of public trust in societal institutions, a primary concern at the base of jurisprudence as well as public health ethics. Both criminal law and public health need high degrees of public confidence to operate well, and this need may justify how other values involved are traded off in cases of conflict. This may be a relevant consideration for the further probing of, e.g., the issue of what conditions or types of forensic risk to target, or what to require regarding the precision of detection methods and effectiveness of preventive interventions. At the same time, public opinion may be seen as posing a threat to the upholding of decent ethical principles. In the criminal law context, this is handled by upholding strict meta-principles of legal security and the rule of law, but it is unclear what counterparts to such safeguards are present in the public health area. This is especially important in view of the strong structural pull towards screening solutions and the lure of policymakers to present simple solutions to difficult problems, the noted societal side effects that may ensue and the observation that it seems very difficult or unlikely to have a screening programme rolled back once instigated, despite the emergence of good reasons against it (Juth and Munthe, 2012) . Together with the unclarity of what safeguards against populist or single-minded excesses would be in place in a new Lombrosian context (where crime policy moves into the public health area), this makes for an unusually complex situation when deciding the basis for balancing the pros and cons of any more concrete new Lombrosian suggestion. At the same time, suppose there could be programmes offering at least some offenders who face long-term incarceration education, medication or surgery that could be scientifically shown to drastically and reliably reduce the risk of recidivism. What reason would there be to say no to that? We have indicated some, but the issue is far from simple. 9. Presumably, this approach will also imply less complicated research ethical challenges than the formerly sketched ones. 10. Of course, the epidemiological links uncovered in such large data sets, may then be forming the basis for further investigations of causal hypotheses, e.g. of a genetic or neuroscientific nature. 11. Of course, there are variations also inside these broad categories. For instance, the cascade approach to detection may limit itself to one I, or use this I as an index for analysing further Is relevantly linked to the index, in analogy with contact tracing in communicable disease management or the mapping of genetic risk in a family, based on the diagnosis of one family member. Likewise, even if a new Lombrosian programme does not single out some specific target 'risk group', it may limit itself to a subgroup of the entire population, e.g. for practical or economic reasons. 12. As mentioned earlier, and as clarified in the description, we do not see this term to imply any distinction between treatment and enhancement, merely as signalling a procedure that invokes a change of I in relation to F. This is in contrast to restriction and exclusion, neither of which invokes any such change. 13. False positives may also cause unnecessary anxiety, of course, as well as seriously affecting both individual and social identity (see the section on stigma, etc. below). 14. A haunting scenario of this kind is painted in Philip Kerr'