The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime is an outstanding, in depth novel written by Adrian Raine who is a British Psychologist. He received his bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology at Oxford University and his Doctor of Philosophy in psychology at York University. He is currently the chair Richard Perry University Professor of psychology, psychiatry, and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent four years in two different prisons in England working as a prison psychologist. While there, he studied prisoners to try to understand why some people become violent criminals and psychopaths. In the book, Raine really stresses what anatomical and biological processes are taking place in the brains of violent criminals and psychopaths. Ultimately concluding that biology is not necessarily destiny.Raine has three objectives in this book. His first objective is to inform the readers about new scientific research conducted by him and other scientists, which focuses on the biological and anatomical issues leading to violence and crime. His second objective is to discuss how social and environmental factors interact with the biological factors that can lead to crime or predispose people to violence. His final objective is to explore the new field of neurocriminology, which applies neuroscience techniques to understand the origins of criminal violent behavior; this involves treatments and the legal system.Raine opens the book with a personal experience of his encounter with a criminal. Raine was on vacation in Turkey with his girlfriend. One night in his hotel room a person broke in and was standing above him in his bed. The intruder and Raine got into a violent fight, and the intruder cut Raine’s throat with a broken blade before he jumped out the window. This really attracts and interests the reader into wanting to know more. Specifically, to know more about why people do crazy, violent things. This also gave good insight to how he initially felt as a victim of a criminal assault and how he felt towards criminals in general. The main argument of the book is that anatomical and biological factors are critical in understanding violent behavior and treating violence and crime. Since biology is not destiny, social and environmental factors impact the biological factors that can lead to an increase of violent behaviors and criminal activities in individuals.When Raine talks about the biological roots of crime he talks about genetics. He explains that our genes shape our physiological functioning. This affects our thinking, our personalities, and our behavior. He uses case studies of identical twins and adoptions to back up his claims on genetics predisposing individuals to crime and violence. He opens Chapter 2, the genetic basis to crime, with the Jeffery Landrigan adoption case study. Landrigan never knew his parents and was adopted at a young age by a good family. In adulthood, he ended up on death row and met his biological father, who was on death row as well. Both of them had committed similar crimes throughout their lives and ended up on death row to pay for them. Raine uses this case study, among many others, to illustrate the basic message that genes definitely matter and they have a big influence on our behavior.After discussing the biological roots of crime, and how they can change to predispose individuals to crime, Raine goes on to talk about the important anatomical malfunctions of the violent brains of murderers. Raine shares his personal research study of the brains of 41 murderers. He used a PET scan to scan all of their brains. He concluded that the murderers had poor prefrontal brain functioning and this correlates with antisocial and violent behaviors. Then he discusses how on the other hand, serial killers and psychopaths have good prefrontal brain functioning. He concludes how the limbic system, specifically the amygdala is malfunctioning in these types of individuals that have good prefrontal brain functioning. To support his claims, he uses the case studies of Antonio Bustamante and Randy Kraft to show the differences in the prefrontal cortex functioning and how they relate to violent and criminal behavior. Bustamante was an impulse murderer and his brain scans showed no functioning of the prefrontal lobe. Kraft on the other hand, is a serial killer who hasn’t got caught in a long time, and his scans showed good functioning in the prefrontal lobe. Raine also used Jane Toppan’s case study to illustrate the amygdala malfunctioning in psychopaths.Raine talks about the social and environmental factors that can influence and predispose individuals to violent criminal behavior. Raine discusses how prenatal care, malnutrition, exposure to toxic materials, and bad parenting can cause brain damage and lead to violent behavior and criminal activity. The environment can lead to brain injuries, which relates to anatomical brain malfunctioning. He uses Phineas Gage’s brain injury as an example of how a brain injury caused by the environment can change behavior. Gage was a railway worker. One day while working, a metal rod entered through his lower left cheek and exited from the top middle part of his head. Surprisingly he was still alive, but because of the damage to his prefrontal cortex his personality and behavior dramatically changed. Gage’s behavioral change was caused by his environment. He also talks about the controversial debate of nature vs. nurture. Some individuals may be genetically predisposed to violent behavior, but it depends on how the social and environmental factors influence those genes.At the end of the book, Raine talks about different treatments that can be offered to criminals as well as the legal system and its implications. He also talks about what the future might or could look like. He isn’t making an excuse for criminals, but he is trying to provide understand and logic to how the brain plays a major role in criminal activity. He tries to provide solutions that can help criminals and possible prevent future crime from happening. Some solutions he provided are castration and different types of drugs. He showed how both of these have had positive influences on criminals.This book was extremely fascinating and informative. I feel like Raine was very organized, which made it easy to read and follow along. He also used appropriate language which non-science readers would be able to understand. He supported his claims and theories with evidence using various case studies along with some of his own personal research and other well-known historical case studies. He would tell a story about a famous murderer or case study that directly related to his topic or point; it really helped me to better understand what he was referring to. Even though these stories were horrid and hard to imagine, they made the book all the more interesting. It propelled me to keep reading further because I wanted to understand how people could do such horrible things. Raine also used multiple visuals such as charts, pictures, and brain scans! Referring to the brain scans allowed me to understand exactly what parts of the brain he was referring to. I thought it was good that he included a lot of personal connections. He related himself to a psychopath showing the similarities in their lives including their brain scans, their personalities, their families, their backgrounds, and their hobbies. He used himself to demonstrate certain points and how the points relate to everyone. He brings up and discusses very controversial topics, but supports his claims with evidence. You don’t have to agree with the points he makes, but his evidence and reasoning make you question your thoughts and make you think about what you believe and why. In the end, Raine also leaves you to think about the future. This made me think about how the future of criminals and the legal system may change due to new research, as well as how these findings and changes can affect my life.Overall this book deserves a 5/5 star rating. Adrian Raine is an incredible author with an incredible mind. People who are interested or studying crime or neuroscience should definitely pick up this book. It gives great theories and details on how the brain works and what causes it to not work properly in criminals. It definitely makes you critically think and question different things.

Many people have little accidents now and then. They might hit their head on something, or walk into something they did not see. However, did anybody ever think it could be possible that a head injury could lead to a total change in someone’s personality and even cause them to turn into a notorious serial killer or rapist (or both)? That is a topic discussed in Adrian Raine’s book called The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. This amazing and informative work is like a history lesson and a neuroscience lesson rolled into one. The book explains many interesting reasons for violent behavior in people including some famous murderers. A few of them were like that at a young age and others developed it later on in adulthood. However, the one thing they had in common was that it was some kind of damage to their brains that played a big part in it. Raine’s work shows that whether a woman smokes and drinks while pregnant or a person suffers multiple blows to the head, any resulting brain damage can awaken a person’s inner violence.The main idea of Adrian Raine’s book is that there are ways violence can be considered a biological phenomenon which is brought on by certain forms of brain damage. There are also a number of different causes for the damages that are listed. One of them is the environment that the person grew up in. This not only has the ability to turn someone into a criminal, but it can also play a part in how they commit their crimes. An example of this would be the killer named Donta Page who grew up in an extremely abusive home with a prostitute mother. It states that when he was a baby, his mother constantly shook him to get him to stop screaming. According to the book, this can lead to what is known as prefrontal dysfunction. Later on in his life, he ended up raping and killing a young woman named Peyton Tuthill. It is said that he slit her throat because he couldn’t take her screaming like his mother couldn’t take his. The book also claims that people who live in places with very little food and are malnourished can be affected. It includes results from an experiment done by a researcher at the University of Southern California named Jianghong Liu. They show that three year old children had lower IQ’s if they suffered from poor nutrition and those same children at age eleven also had low IQ’s.The book goes on to explain that sometimes, brain damage can happen before the person is even born. In other words, it can occur because their mothers are doing things like drinking, taking drugs, or smoking while they are pregnant with them. According to the book, if a woman drinks while pregnant, her baby could be subjected to what is known as fetal alcohol exposure. It also mentions experiments that have been done which demonstrate how this can cause certain types of damage to the brain of the unborn child such as where the right side of the hippocampus, which helps with memory and emotions, is larger than the left.It is also said in the book that sometimes changes in a person’s behavior can occur suddenly due to changes in medical conditions. An example mentioned is Mr. Oft who was just a regular American man who worked as a teacher and loved both his wife Anne and stepdaughter Christina (age 12) very much. However, it soon appeared that he was loving his stepdaughter a little too much. According to Raine’s book, he began to touch Christina after he started getting into her bed. He also began to do things like go to massage parlors more often and even started a child pornography collection. Mr. Oft was soon arrested, but before he could go to prison, a scan was done on his brain and the mystery to his strange behavioral change was solved. It turns out it was caused by a large tumor compressing the right side of his brain. The story of Mr. Oft shows that brain tumors are like magic wands that can turn your everyday person into someone else entirely.The book ends with a chapter on what the author thinks we should expect to happen in the future of neuroscience. It talks about the idea that violent crime will one day be seen as a clinical disorder because new treatments will be made which will put an end to violence. There is also the mention of certain programs that might be born in the future. One is the LOMBROSO (Legal Offensive on Murder: Brain Research Operation for the Screening of Offenders) program of 2034 where males that are eighteen years old or older will need to have their brain scanned and DNA tested at their local hospital. Then there is the NCSP (National Child Screening Program) in 2040 where medical, social, behavioral, and psychological evaluations which include all past school, medical record, and social data are given to ten-year-old children. When it comes to my opinion of the future of neuroscience, I would have to say that the program and operation mentioned above sound like they could be really useful and might even be more effective than the background checks and fingerprinting we have today. I also think that finding a cure for violence sounds amazing and it would really help save and protect many lives. As long as the scientists keep up their experiments and research, who knows what will happen.I would definitely give this book five stars, maybe even more if I could. It almost seems to take the reader on a journey into the mind of a violent person. Not only does it use very descriptive words regarding neuroscience, it also contains a number of charts, graphs and even brain scan photographs from studies conducted. What’s even more interesting is that some of the studies were done on actual prisoners. However, the one thing that I think is really amazing about this book is the number of real life events and experiences it refers to from the winter in Amsterdam from 1944-1945 to more current ones such as the lives claimed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings of 2012. This is a great book for those who want to go into the field of neuroscience because it talks about different parts of the brain including prefrontal white matter, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus among others. However, it is even a good choice for people who just want to know more about what makes criminals who they are.I will conclude this by saying that I am very glad I chose to read this book. The truth is, I first discovered it when I attended a presentation about it last semester in Dominican University’s Priory Auditorium as an assignment for one of my college courses. My reading helped me add more to the information I had already gained from that experience. In the past, I had absolutely no idea that brain damage could turn a nice person into a violent criminal. I also did not know that so many things could cause that damage including their home environment, head trauma, alcohol, drugs, or even malnutrition. I never really thought about what neuroscientists will be working on in the future either. The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian Raine really increased my knowledge of neuroscience and the history of certain murderers with its informative chapters and great data collections. From now on, I will always be very careful in any situation. There’s no telling if or when my violent side could awaken and I don’t want it to ever happen.