The Anatomy of Violence (60 page)

Everyone feels discernibly safer. Oddly enough, many LPs are not too dissatisfied with their lot. Conditions are fairly reasonable. The
food is quite good and nutritious. Those with partners have sex every weekend but without the social obligations and hassles that go with it. Their kids are not around to have screaming arguments with. There is no work to produce work pressure. They have TV, movies, books, gym, swimming, basketball, and other recreational activities. There is less stress all around. Even the treatment is not a problem, and in fact the therapy sessions are stimulating and provocative and something they look forward to. Ironically, what they least like is being around people like themselves, the other LPs. Overall, though, it isn’t all that bad—a bit like being in a summer camp but without having to pay. Or like resting up in the hospital but without feeling ill.

The astonishing success of the program was one of the reasons for the reelection of the party that had initially introduced LOMBROSO. And yet there is still a significant level of serious teenage
violence, with two separate
mass killings in shopping malls in the same year involving young teenagers. Homicide rates are also not as low as they were in the good old days of 2013, even though they have come down. The government and its scientific advisors sat back from the glow of the independent review that lauded the program as a breakthrough. They hunched around a conference table and thought it through. “It’s never too late to prevent violence” had been the mantra of the scientific advisors in 2034. Now, in 2039, they have a new prevention mantra—“It’s never too early to stop the rot.” If LOMBROSO is working well with a screening at eighteen years of age, then why not screen earlier?

In 2040, the
National Child Screening Program (NCSP) is announced. All children ten years of age are given a comprehensive medical, psychological, social, and behavioral evaluation that incorporates all prior school, social, and medical-record data. Anxiety and stress in youngsters are on the rise, just as autism was at the turn of the century, together with obesity, depression, and a host of other medical and psychiatric conditions. The screening program is ostensibly an evaluation of dyslexia and learning disabilities, allergies, vision, and obesity—indeed, all physical and mental health problems that go along with children entering puberty earlier than they used to. What is also included in the health screening under the rubric of “behavior problems” are “emotion-regulation problems” and “violence potential.” After all, violence is now widely viewed as an international public-health problem.

Prospective longitudinal studies are increasingly documenting the
biosocial package of early factors giving rise to adult crime. Together with advanced
machine-learning statistical techniques, they are doing a decent job of predicting
future crime from childhood data. Not as well as LOMBROSO did at eighteen, because it’s harder to predict crime from an earlier age—but with persuasive predictive power nonetheless.

Under the new NCSP, parents of some ten-year-olds are informed that their child is a rotten apple. The NCSP determines that little Johnny has a 48 percent chance of developing into a serious violent offender in adulthood, and a 14 percent chance of committing homicide. That’s the bad news.

The good news, however, is that the NCSP has developed residential treatment programs that should be successful in cutting these odds by more than half, to 18 percent for serious violence and 6 percent for homicide. It does, of course, mean that Johnny will have to be taken away for two years for intensive biosocial therapy, but after that he will be back home.

Yes, it is true that it is not a perfect solution. There will still be a chance that he will become an offender anyway, even if his parents do opt for the residential treatment. And yes, the overall odds that he will become a serious violent offender without intervention are a fraction less than half. But there you have it—it’s your choice. What will you decide for your little Johnny?

What would
you
decide if you were Johnny’s mother or father? Put yourself in their situation. Do you want
your
child whisked off to an institution for treatment and branded as a potential future offender? What are you going to tell your relatives and friends and neighbors? Think of the stigma. What about Johnny losing his friends? And what bad new friends will he make in this residential program for criminals-in-the-making that might make real a self-fulfilling prophecy?

On the other hand … are you just going to stand by and do nothing? You know full well that Johnny has a very significant chance of ruining not just his own life, but your life, and the lives of innocent victims. These are lives
you
could save if you only act.

On balance, the majority of parents give up their children for residential treatment. Bill and
Faith
Kinkel decide to put their son Kip into treatment—it is, if nothing else, a welcome break from their endless struggle to get him back on the rails. Yes, in the NCSP even good parents like the Kinkels have children who are identified as violence-prone—it’s the well-off as well as the underserved who are affected.

In 2042 there is a controversial change to the NCSP initiative after two eleven-year-old schoolchildren coldheartedly tortured and killed a three-year-old child, having abducted him from a shopping mall while his mother was distracted. The act was caught on the global CCTV network. It turned out that both of the killers had been identified by the NCSP the previous year as being in dire need of residential treatment, but their respective parents had elected to decline intervention. Analysts argued that children in the red zone likely have parents who do not have the best interests of their children at heart. They are not responsible parents and not good decision-makers—reasons their child is in the red zone in the first place. NCSP officials now need to act “in loco parentis”—to step into the parents’ shoes and make the decision. The treatment now becomes compulsory.

Just two years later, in 2044, research analysts on the LOMBROSO program make another recommendation to the
government that results in a further addendum to the National Child Screening Program. If a child is in the red zone, isn’t his biological father likely a bad apple too? What’s he up to these days? After all, like father, like son. Perhaps he missed his LP screen when he was eighteen. His new status as the biological parent of the offspring identified in the NCSP needs to be factored into the equation. He is now brought into detention pending reevaluation of his LP status; 2044 is slowly but surely sounding all too like
1984
.

It’s now 2049 and the fifteenth anniversary of the LOMBROSO program. The nation is nine years into the NCSP. Together these programs are undeniably making a dent in the rates of juvenile and adult
violence. They have also significantly reduced nonviolent crime. It has unquestionably been a dicey game to play, but cost-benefit analyses clearly document the winnings, which are invested back into welfare programs and have gained bipartisan political support for the program. The government is popular, but the opposition is ever present. Fortunately, the government’s research analysts have another card up their sleeve.

LOMBROSO and NCSP are certainly costly prevention programs even with investment from the private sector. There could be even greater savings. An avant-garde cadre of research analysts and neurocriminologists
propose a controversial program that is outvoted by other advisors. But a minority report is written and submitted alongside the majority vote for senior government officials to consider. Following in the traditions of LOMBROSO and NCSP initiatives, the minority report proposes to stop crime before it starts. But this time it proposes that citizens get a license before they even have a child. After a very long and heated debate, there is a small majority vote in favor, and the policy becomes law.

The train of thinking in the minority report goes something like this: Poor parenting has undeniably been linked to later violence. Genetic studies documented not just that antisocial parents transmit their bad genes to their children, but that the negative social experience of having a bad parent is also a causal factor for antisocial behavior. The issue is not to use
eugenics as a final solution to crime, advocates argue, but to create a social policy to promote positive behavior. Better parents, better children. The minority report’s perspective focuses on children’s
rights—minors need to be protected and better treated, and would-be parents need to be responsible. They must report in for
licensing.

Cars can be killers, and so you need a license before you can drive. Kids can be killers too. So the logic goes that you should also have a license before you can have a child. Just as you need to document practical skills in driving a car and also knowledge of the right way to drive, you also need to show theoretical and practical proficiency in rearing a child. It’s only right for the child and society.

Civil-rights activists remonstrate loudly against the minority report, claiming it is taking away a fundamental human right. In response, the government adds the caveat of compulsory classes in parenting skills in all schools. Now everyone has the potential to pass the licensing exam, they say. No child left behind. No more excuses.

Classes are structured to be age-appropriate and to start at a relatively early age. They teach children everything from the basics of reproduction to prenatal nutrition, stress reduction, the early needs of a developing baby, providing structure and support for the growing child, negotiation skills with teenagers, what psychological problems teenagers have, and how to help them. The broader context is on becoming a responsible citizen, with the curriculum covering knowledge-acquisition, social skills, decision-making, and emotion-regulation. The examination covers practice as well as theory, just like
a driving test. What to do—and what not to do. The large majority of children pass and get their license.

Some parents are opposed, but what wins the day is that kids actually enjoy the one-hour Friday afternoon class far more than Monday morning’s matrix algebra. The teenagers love to talk about sex, intimate relationships, dealing with drugs, and peer-group pressures—all the stuff they are going through and will have to deal with in their own child. They enjoy the “good parent—bad kid” role-play pairings in which one of them acts as the good parent while the other one acts—well—at being basically themselves.

Some teenagers never knew that vigorously shaking a baby when it cries cuts the white fibers connecting the prefrontal cortex with the limbic system. They did not know that babies have to be fed in the middle of the night. They never knew the long-term financial cost of having to bring up a kid. They not only learn about how to be a better parent, but they also learn social skills that help them manage their current relationships with their parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends, as well as academic skills on human development, brain development, and behavioral control. Schoolkids like it, teachers like it, and parents actually learn a useful thing or two from their kids about parenting that they did not know. The kids themselves are actually becoming more manageable and understanding of their parents’ position. It is an all-around winner.

Yet the licensing program still has significant opposition from human-rights advocates. Civil liberty advocates remonstrate that the government is taking away the right to have children and essentially criminalizing pregnancy. The government’s retort is that any woman can become pregnant—she just has to pass the licensing exam before she gives birth.
³⁹
To make it enforceable, there have to be sanctions for illegal parenting—just as there are sanctions for dangerous driving. If she is unlicensed, a mother caught with a baby has her child taken away into a foster home but is also offered a crash course on parenting and the opportunity to take the examination. If she passes, her baby will be returned—although there are inevitably yearly follow-ups on her parental skills, given her documented lack of responsibility and law-breaking behavior.
DNA banks also allow the biological fathers to be tracked and sanctioned if they are not licensed.

Opponents argue vociferously that the program is inherently eugenic, as those with learning disabilities are less able to pass the
examination. The government has countered by arguing that only a small minority will fail, and, as in a driving test, they will be given a second chance. They can learn the skills if they really want to. There is also a surprising number of more privileged kids who in pilot testing showed themselves to be pretty clueless at parenting—it isn’t just the poor kids who have problems. In fact, quite a number of underprivileged kids have done very well on the exam—because they have already taken on the role of parenting their younger siblings. They know all the ropes of parenting already.

Despite strident debate, the majority of the public feels on balance that there is something inherently sensible in the government’s plan. Most people recognize that parents are not perfect and laud efforts to reduce child abuse, improve parenting skills, and prevent future violence. The school authorities are surprisingly oppositional. It turns out that they want as much class time as possible for traditional academic subjects because school evaluations are based on that. The government puts paid to that objection by mandating school evaluation based partly on grades in parenting—and school authorities are then suddenly in strong support. In 2050 the
Parental License Act is passed.

In the first few years, parenting skills go up and unwanted pregnancies go down. Juvenile delinquency declines too, as adolescents achieve a greater sense of responsibility, empathy, and agency alongside slightly improved relationships with their parents. There are long-term reductions in child abuse and later adult violence as teenagers grow up to be more responsible parents. The result is a new generation of children more cared for and loved by their parents. It is a winner with the public, and the government continues to win its war on violence—and its battle with the opinion polls.