Criminomics: stopping crime before it starts

Criminomics Bears Fruit: 2037 Murder Rate Lowest Since 1964

Dylan looks like any normal six-year-old. He is bright and a little mischievous, has many friends, and is praised by his teachers as a model student. But his normalcy is only skin deep. In his cells lies the DNA of a murderer.

Though Dylan has gene variants that give him a more than 90% chance of premeditated mass murder, he will never commit a crime. Thanks to early intervention by doctors, Dylan’s criminal tendencies were identified before birth. Rather than abort the fetus, however, Dylan’s parents agreed to an intensive program of medication and counseling that will all but ensure that Dylan will lead a happy, normal, peaceful life.

Dylan is one of the success stories of the Criminal Genome Project, or CGP, the effort to sequence the complete set of genes involved in murder and other antisocial behaviors. The controversial science on which this project is based—criminomics—is winning converts, now that the latest crime figures are in. Last year, the annual murder rates in 8 American cities dropped to double digits for the first time since the middle of the twentieth century. In Washington, DC, only 90 people died by gunshot last year, down from 103 in 2036. Experts attribute the drop to criminopathy, a medical and public-health approach to crime based on criminomics. The criminomic method uses high-speed genome sequencing to to identify criminal tendencies at birth and begin treatment early in life. Clinical trials for criminal-gene therapy, which would eliminate antisocial tendencies permanently, are underway and, though preliminary, are showing promising early results. The first criminopathic patients are just hitting their 20s now—and the peace is deafening.

The CGP is run by Dr. Bart O’Day, a criminomicist at the Baler Agricultural and Behavioral University in the Republic of Texas. O’Day wrote the grant proposal that funded the project after a tragic shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut in 2012 in which 20 children and 6 adults were killed by a lone gunman. Thankfully, such a crime has since become unimaginable, thanks to the efforts of O’Day and his colleagues.

“It was an obvious thing to do,” O’Day said. “In the years just before the CGP, we had sequenced the cancer genome, the influenza genome, the pseudome, the schizome, and the retardome. The criminome was just lying in wait for us. So the science was there. All we needed was the motivation.”

In fact, the motivation had been there for 150 years. In the 1870s, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso defined a “criminal type,” characterized by distinctive facial features and, ironically, the excessive use of tattooing, which he used in one of the first systematic attempts to prevent crime by biological methods.[1] About the same time, the Victorian polymath Francis Galton developed “composite photography,” in which he superimposed images of faces as a means of identifying the “criminal type.” “If criminals are found to have certain special types of features, that certain personal peculiarities distinguish those who commit certain classes of crime,” observed Edmund DuCane, one of the leading criminologists of Victorian England, “the tendency to crime is in those persons born or bred in them, and either they are incurable or the tendency can only be checked by taking them in hand at the earliest periods of life.”[2]

With the creation of the science of genetics after the turn of the last century, vaguenesses such as “inborn tendencies” and “heredity” hardened into “genes.” In 1914, the American psychologist Henry H. Goddard wrote, “The criminal is not born; he is made.” Goddard traced criminality to mental retardation, or “feeble-mindedness,” in the term of the day. By compassionately treating feeble-mindedness, Goddard believed one could prevent crime. The feeble-minded type, Goddard wrote, was “misunderstood and mistreated, driven into criminality for which he is well fitted by nature. It is hereditary feeble-mindedness not hereditary criminality that accounts for the conditions.”[3] Goddard believed he had found a single Mendelian gene for feeble-mindedness. By breeding it out of the population, he thought he could eliminate crime, as well as poverty, prostitution, and much illness. Though the feeblemindedness gene has been discredited, Goddard’s belief that crime is a genetic disease rather than a perverse exercise of free will has transformed our criminal justice system.

The decisive step was in reframing crime in terms of public health rather than justice. In the early1990s, the National Institute of Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health (today subsumed under the National Institute of Genomics) undertook a massive Violence Initiative based on similar principles. It pursued a public health approach to urban crime, which, proponents recognized, was based on biology (and therefore, ultimately, genes).[4] Uncontroversial at first, liberal opposition to the effort mounted, ultimately leading to the canceling of a scientific conference on genetic factors in crime in 1992.[5] This first Violence Initiative died a rather brutal and noisy death. Yet work on the biological basis of crime continued apace. In 1995, a Danish twin study identified the first crime gene, and more were identified shortly after the turn of the century.

But it was high-speed genome sequencing, combined with sophisticated methods of correlating complex behaviors with DNA sequence, that finally provided the technological breakthrough to stop crime before it starts. After the 2012 school shooting, it took a full year for O’Day’s team to sequence the criminal genome (today it could be done in an afternoon). But in 2014, they published paper describing 112 gene variants that together account for more than 99% of predisposition to murder. The genes were patented and licensed to pharmaceutical companies, and seven new targeted therapies were quickly added to the standard psychiatric armamentarium of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. The federal Violence Initiative was reinstated in 2015 as the Institute of Crime Prevention (ICM), a branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

The first mandatory screening for criminal tendencies was put in place in Washington, DC, in 2018. Other states quickly followed; today, only West Dakota and North Virginia lack screening laws. Convicted murderers were the first to be screened. The ICM then tied crime screening to the back-to-school vaccination requirements for students in secondary and primary schools. Most states now test babies at birth, with blood from the standard heel-stick. Babies born with greater than 50% chance of committing murder have their standard RFID chips, implanted in every child at birth, encoded with the designation “Precrim.”

Individuals identified as precriminal are placed under the care of a criminopathic physician, assigned a health care worker, and given criminal prophylaxis: a treatment regimen tailored to their genetic and environmental circumstances. In all cases, this involves a combination of medications and counseling designed to maintain equanimity, promote sociality, and minimize the risk of triggers, including certain music and video games. Teachers and the parents of friends can discretely scan the child and take steps to minimize conflict and quickly intervene should violence erupt. Most states now prohibit the guardians of precrims from keeping firearms in their homes. NRA members oppose such bans, pointing out that since precrims can be dosed so as to ensure docility with a wide margin of safety, prohibiting guns in precrim homes is overkill.

Combined, these methods have proven remarkably effective. Murder rates began dropping as soon as the programs were put in place, but as the first neonatal precrims hit their teens, rates began to plummet. The rates of other violent crimes have also begun to fall, though somewhat more slowly: rapes are down in most states, as are armed robberies and even grafitti and illegal dumping. Scientists at the CGP explain these results by hypothesizing that many criminal behaviors share a common genetic mechanism, possibly related to emotional intelligence.

For all its success, the program has its opponents. Eugene Galton, a member of the Galton dynasty of scientific criminologists, recognizes the benefits of the criminopathy program but thinks the social costs are too high. “Liberty is too high a price to pay for safety,” he says. “We’re ceding our free will to an iatrocracy—a government by the doctors.”

Such philosophical musings carry little weight with inner-city residents who now sleep more peacefully, without the constant pops of gunfire that once punctuated the night. Dylan’s mother sees safety as the best kind of freedom: “I prefer a war with drugs to a War on Drugs,” she says. “I love my son; I’d rather put chemical bars around his mind than steel ones around his body.”