Identifying Criminals Did you ever wonder if there was something different about the criminal brain when compared with the average law abiding citizen? When Einstein died, he donated his brain to science. It was said he had an I.Q. of about 160, which is genius, but doesn’t tell the entire story. I say this because there were and are people who had and have higher I.Qs. Even though this is true he was able to out science all of them. It seemed there was more to the story than just the way his brain looked which was pretty much the same as everyone else. There was exceptions however to the average brain and they were the parietal lobes were about 15% bigger. The parietal lobes are responsible for processing somatosensory information from the body; this includes touch, pain, temperature, and the sense of limb position. Like the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes are also involved in integrating information from different modalities. The definition was given in an article on sciencedirect.com. Somatosensory means sensations involved with the body not involved with the primary sense organs. To me this means this part of the brain didn’t seem to be involved with his amazing insights. There was a time when criminologists thought criminals were physically different than the rest of us and this could be proven by the art of phrenology. Phrenology was thought to be able to prove this by the shape of the skull. This was based on the idea there were 27 organs in our brains and each was responsible for a different trait. Believing this a man named Gall came to the conclusion the size of the organ would influence the shape of the brain so one would be able to tell what good and bad traits a person had by examining the bulges in the skull over certain areas. We know today this was a ridiculous theory. I have to wonder however how many people were convicted because they had a knot on their heads? As far as Einstein was concerned, many experts have started to believe not only was he a genius, but his brain may have been wired differently than most people leading him to have abilities most of us do not possess. There is the thought however, by some, we all have incredible abilities, but have yet learned to access them. Some of this is based on the fact some people who have had severe head trauma have gained abilities which seem impossible. I personally knew of one person who was walking along when a very heavy metal screen struck him in the head after if fell from several stories high. He was rushed to the hospital and not expected to survive. As he lay in the hospital bed, he began to talk in different languages which was verified by some of the workers there. His only language was English and he had never studied these languages yet spoke them perfectly. As his condition improved, he began to lose this ability until it disappeared entirely. The predominant theory today is criminality is learned. This means if a person comes from a family or group of friends where it is believed being a criminal is okay, there is a good chance they will learn to be one. There are different types of criminal behavior and different reasons for it. There are habitual criminals, desperate people, nonviolent criminals, violent ones, white collar ones and even the criminally insane. Sometimes it is hard to figure out if someone is criminally insane or not. We tend to think of people who are serial killers and eat their prey as criminally insane, but often we don’t feel this way about mass killers. I don’t want to trivialize crime. Just because someone is a nonviolent offender, doesn’t make them a good person, they are still a criminal and all criminals hurt society in one way or another. The shop lifters steal items from stores. This has the effect of raising the prices for all of us and if it happens enough, the store will go out of business making it harder for us to shop. There was a certain department store chain which was around for years. As the neighborhood changed for some of its stores and crime increased, the shoplifting events went way up until people actually would walk out the door with televisions, furniture and other expensive items and dare the store people to try and stop them. Eventually the chain went out of business, hurting the neighborhood people. Today murders have become more commonplace in our cities. Many young people are involved and being killed, but yet it continues, and in many places, there doesn’t seem to be any worthwhile programs being enacted to try and stop the slaughter. When I hear things like there were 50 shootings in one weekend in Chicago, I have to wonder why the city doesn’t clamp down? It is true we cannot identify a criminal by looking at a person. I saw this myself on one occasion. When a fellow worker got very sick and had to go out on sick leave from his job, his son would come around and collect his check. He was very well dressed in a suit and tie with a fresh haircut. After a few checks being given to him a call was made by the employees wife wanting to know where her husband’s checks were. She was destroyed by the fact her son was stealing them. After that they would send around the other son which looked more like a beatnik, but he was loyal to his family and there was no more problems. It takes an especially bad person to steal from his father who it turned out was on his deathbed. Some criminologists believe if we stop the so called small crimes like jumping over a turnstile in the subway, we will prevent a lot of the larger crimes, because many who do the jumping already are wanted criminals. This was the brainchild of Jack Maple, the New York City Deputy Police Commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and it worked. Crime went way down in the city because of that kind of thinking, but today instead of punishing those turnstile jumpers the city is considering putting in bigger turnstiles that are harder to jump over. This will cost the tax payers millions of dollars. There is just something wrong with this kind of thinking. The best way to cut down on crime is by punishment for the crime. While we can’t identify a criminal by the way a person looks, we can identify them by what they do.
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