Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

Abstract

On 26 April 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by neurocriminologist Adrian Raine promoting his newest book, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. On the newspaper’s website, an image of a black-and-white brain scan overlaid with handcuffs headed the essay. Clicking ‘play’ turned the image into a video filled with three-dimensional brain illustrations and Raine’s claims that some brains are simply more biologically prone to violence than others. Rejecting what he describes as ‘the dominant model for understanding criminal behaviour in the twentieth century’ – a model based ‘almost exclusively on social and sociological’ explanations – Raine wrote that ‘the genetic basis of criminal behaviour is now well established’ through molecular and behavioural genetics.

Why Sociology Matters to Race and Biosocial Science

“…US-based geneticists and neuroscientists studying crime have tried to avoid any hint of racerelated connections to their work, insisting that their investigations are race-neutral and do not seek to explain racial patterns in offending. These scientists acknowledge the troublesome past of biological studies on crime and race, and unlike biosocial criminologists, they envision the biosocial criminal as a postracial being (Andrews & Metzl 2016). Brain researchers try to manage inconvenient facts like race in the lab (Fallin et al 2018) and instead focus on the basic neurobiological factors of crime, creating a means of solving racial inequalities without having to deal directly with politically sticky issues of race and racism (Rollins 2020).…”