Gary Pugh, the director of the Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers urged the necessity of a discussion over how far British officials should go in trying to identify future criminals. Future criminals? That’s right. Children can exhibit behavior at an age as young as five years old that may indicate a good chance of future criminal behavior. Gary Pugh is Britain’s most senior forensics expert, and he recommends that primary school children should be eligible to have their DNA added to a database if they exhibit behavior that indicates that they may become criminals later in life.
Pugh says that the suggested system is in line with criminological theory, which indicates that criminals often start by committing minor offenses that gradually escalate to more serious crimes. Scotland Yard criminologists are confident that they can identify such patterns in children.
This issue is as much a matter of bioethics as civil liberties. It raises the obvious objection that children who are identified as exhibiting these pre-criminal behaviors will be stigmatized for the rest of their lives. Perhaps they might even have “grown out” of their tendencies but may be instead led to a life of crime by a society that expected nothing more of them. Parental consent is an important factor here, and although teachers will have a lot of power to influence the rest of a child’s life, possibly unfairly, Pugh insists that the teachers will shoulder the responsibility of trying to alter the child’s behavior for the benefit of the child and the society at large.
Some parents and teachers feel that the cataloging of these children’s DNA is just the first step towards some sort of terrible futuristic police state. I can certainly understand both sides of the argument but I can definitely see the economic advantage of the plan. Violent crime alone cost England 13 billion pounds last year and preventing crime before it starts by identifying future criminals before they become a problem could greatly reduce both the crime rate and the amount of money poured into the system. But should we be more concerned with the monetary benefits or the societal drawbacks of this system? Only time will tell.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/mar/16/youthjustice.children
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2 comments:
I think that there are even more problems with labeling children as potential criminals that Rachel outlined at first. The evidence that Scotland Yard has is evidence that is specific to how criminals acted when they were younger: they usually started by committing minor offences and then escalating into committing serious crimes. This evidence, however, does not compare the criminal population with the population of people that are troublemakers when they are in elementary school or that commit minor offences in adolescence. Many people get in trouble when they are young and then grow out of it and the only way to determine how many people would be unnecessarily tagged as potential criminals and thus to assess the social impact of the false assessments would be to compare those sets of data.
I also believe that there is also a decisive answer to the question she poses at the end of her commentary concerning whether we should “be more concerned with the monetary benefits or the societal drawbacks of this system.” I think that the societal drawbacks distinctly outweigh the monetary benefits and the potential societal benefits of such a program. Many people will be unnecessarily followed and tracked, and this would have the consequence of turning more people into criminals because they think that since there have been these definite social studies done by a government organization to show that they will probably be criminals, many will think that their actions are out of their control. This is also mostly extraneous and would not help to prevent crime: what I Scotland Yard going to do- sentence people and punish people for the potential to commit crimes? The DNA database would make sentencing slightly easier but it would also not play a preventative role. Overall, I think that there are many more problems with this system than there are benefits and thus it should not be adopted.
I strongly agree with Kelley’s comment. Upon first glance of the data, there may be a correlation between childhood behavior and the probability of committing crimes in the future, but by no means does that indicate causation. To merit the creation of such a database of genetic information, officials and researchers would first have to verify this connection between childhood behavior and future criminal behavior. Also, even if the connection between childhood behavior and potential for criminal offense were to be verified, I feel as though there is still a significant flaw in the economic argument.
If such a database of information were to be created, it would give rise to the potential and probable discrimination against individuals who may have committed minor offenses as children. For example, consider a hypothetical situation in which a young child, say a five-year old boy tries to steal a stick of candy from a convenience store. The store manager catches the young boy in the act, and calls the police. Having committed petty theft, the young boy could face a range of penalties, ranging from a fine to even jail time depending on where the crime was committed. But instead of enduring his sentence and having the entire situation serve as a lesson to lead an honest life, the boy is branded for life, his crime causing his DNA to be entered into a national database. Growing up, the boy faces obstacles due to the ongoing consequences of his petty theft. Being accepted to college is difficult, buying health insurance proves to be a trial, and finding a job is practically down-right impossible.
Socially, the impacts of such a system are obvious. Individuals who commit even the smallest misdemeanor could be tracked and discriminated against throughout life, making it difficult to lead an honest life even if they had wanted to. To survive, what would our hypothetical young boy be willing to do? The system seems to be self-destructive in the fact that individuals that had committed prior crimes may in fact be forced to commit further crimes to survive against the discrimination that arises due to their label as a “future criminal”. A self-fulfilling prophecy, this label also does not justify the economic argument proposed. Yes, the government may have a list of “future criminals” but will still spend countless resources watching, tracking, and catching these criminals. Additionally, the unemployment of “future criminals” will also hurt the economy as the overall amount of spending decreases, and the country falls into an economic depression. Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but it serves to depict this “futuristic police state” in all its glory as both society and the economy suffer from the system of labeling “future criminals.”
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