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

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

This return of the Lomrosian vision in contemporary science has attracted some critical attention in mass media (Cohen, 2011; Tallis, 2013) , but has so far received sparse scrutiny from ethical standpoints. Horskötter has commented on versions of the Lombrosian vision targeting children and psychopathy (Horstkötter and de Wert, 2013; Horstkötter et al., 2014) , and there has been some interest from scholars within the rapidly growing field of neurolaw (e.g. Søbirk Petersen, 2014). Most of this latter field, however, focus on the possible impact of neuroscientific findings on legal responsibility and legal practices more generally (Aharoni et al. 2008; Vincent, 2013 Vincent, , 2014 . The lack of research on ethical implications of the new Lombrosian vision may be due to the intricacies of applying standard bioethics perspectives to areas where health care and medicine is put to serve the legal system, such as forensic psychiatry (Appelbaum, 2008; Munthe et al., 2010) . However, the general notion of broad screening programmes for the purpose of advancing general societal values actualize particular ethical complexities (Juth and Munthe, 2012) , and the very idea of basing both penal and preventive criminal policy on forensic psychiatric risk assessment brings both scientific and ethical hazards of its own (Nilsson et al., 2009) . At the same time, just as it did in the 19th century, the idea of switching said policy to a mode of prevention rather than one that is met within the range of criminal sanctions, may seem the logical step given that crimes can be explained by factors outside the offenders' control and thus be used to challenge the very idea of retribution (Gray, 1858; Raine, 2013; Glenn and Raine, 2014) . This article aims to facilitate further specific inquiry into this intersection of bio, legal and social ethics by providing a critical overview of the new Lombrosian vision from a public health perspective and to review some central ethical issues actualized by its general idea of forensic screening programmes 2 for early detection of individuals who are at risk of committing crimes to target with preventive or mitigating measures.