It's a debate that is by no means new and has intrigued thinkers for millennia. Dr. Rafter [Nicole Hahn Rafter, CREATING BORN CRIMINALS, University of Illinois Press, 1997] called it the "question about the origins of evil." The question has been answered in three different ways.

One is religious. Some theologians pontificate that God predestines some people to sin. The second way to answer the question is based in biology. And the third way is described by Dr. Rafter thusly: "The third type of answer is definitional: according to such explanations, no matter what the theological or biological circumstances may be, born criminals are produced through social processes and do not – in fact cannot – exist independent of them."

Dr. Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), known as the father of modern criminology, popularized the notion of a "born criminal." His view represented an extreme statement of biological determinism which had great influence well into the 1900s. While his views on determinism are said to be outdated, the idea that criminals have particular physiognomic defects or deformities still is accepted by some highly credentialed scientists.

The science of phrenology flourished in the 1800s. It was based on the belief that basic brain functions could be identified through their manifestations in cranial prominence characteristics. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall was one of the "pioneers" in that field. He sought to identify the fundamental human faculties through scientific observation by "meticulously examining animal behavior, family life, schools, the jails, and the asylums, medical cases, the press, men of genius and the biographies of great or meritorious men." (Pierre Schlag, "Commentary–Law and Phrenology," 110 Harv. L.Rev. 877, 879 (Feb. 1997). Now sometimes termed "junk science," Schlag points our that in 1849, phrenology was a confident science, promising clear and certain knowledge concerning the mental attributes and behaviors of human beings. There were conferences and symposia. There were professional associations. There were lengthy learned tomes and scholarly journals. The first issue of the American Phrenological Journal appeared as early as October of 1838.

Rafter describes that the development of the biological theory of crime proceeded in three stages:

"During the first stage, which ran from the late eighteenth century until after the Civil War (ca. 1785– 1875) physicians tried to explain seemingly innate depravity in terms of biologically based mental disorders. Their biological explanations had little hereditarian content, however, and only slightly affected the treatment of convicted criminals. During the third stage, which began about 1925 and continues into the present, biological explanations have again tended to avoid hereditarianism and have had little impact (at least so far) on criminal justice policies. During the second of these three stages, however, from about 1875 into the 1920s, born-criminal theories incorporated popular hereditarian explanations of social problems and significantly affected public policy. Because second-stage versions of the born-criminal theories all built to some degree on eugenics principles, it seems useful to group them under the general heading of eugenic criminology."

CREATING BORN CRIMINALS also explores the "creating" of the "born criminals" category of inmates in American penitentiaries. It is a movement that started in the early 1900's, when New York began classifying certain convicts as "defective delinquents," which was the then current definition for born criminals, and placing them in a specially constructed Napanoch Institution for Defective Delinquents.

Today, Han Brunner, M.D., Ph.D., professor of clinical genetics at the Department of Anthropogenetics at a University Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and others, resting their positions on Darwin's and Mendell's theses, have published papers "proving" that violence is hereditary and unless stopped could lead to the ultimate destruction of the human race. Some modern-day researchers in genetics and DNA have established how genes are mutated; they have created violent species in the laboratories based upon their experiments in regeneration of mutated genes. Amazon.com sells books like "Born to Crime" (by Lawrence Taylor, July 1984), and others like "IS THIS CHILD ALREADY A CRIMINAL?"

Last year, on Saturday, September 23, 2000, the Kansas City Star published an article on juvenile recklessness, which asserted that there is a biological basis for the recklessness of teens in their brains.

Junk science, or true science?