The Anatomy of Violence by Adrian Raine

Preface
    It’s July 19, 2012, and it’s as hot as the hobs of hell here in Philadelphia. The air-conditioning in my work office conked out, so I came home to an airy upstairs library room to write this preface. I should have been filming acrime documentary this afternoon with a crew from Chicago, but they had their equipment stolen this morning. That’s not a surprise, though, as crime strikes all the time here in Philadelphia. Yesterday, I was dealing with two police detectives—Lydon and Boyle—here at my house, which had beenburgled yesterday. Just what you want when you come back after midnight from Hong Kong. But I live close to my data, which is one reason I reside here in West Philadelphia.
    Looking around this upstairs library, I’m surrounded by hundreds of rare-edition books on crime andviolence that the burglar didn’t take. I suppose he’s not as interested as we are in what causes crime. They’re not my books, mind you. They belong to the people who lived here during the seventy-year period before I moved in. Most belong toMarvin Wolfgang, a world-renowned criminologist who, beginning in 1969, sat and wrote in this very library room. For the thirty years before that,Thorsten Sellin, another world-leading criminologist and Wolfgang’s PhD supervisor, lived here, having bought the house just seven weeks before the outbreak of World War II. I am at his desk. For three-quarters of a century between the two of them—professor and mentor—these intellectual giants in sociology redefined the field of criminology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, where I myself now work.
    Given that remarkable criminological legacy, my mind inevitably turns to a historicalperspective on the fundamental question addressed by this book. Is there a significantbiological contribution to the causes and cures of crime? It turns out that that idea was all the rage 150 years ago, when an Italian doctor namedCesare Lombroso broke with intellectual tradition and, taking a novel empirical approach to studyingcrime, tried to persuade the world of a basis to crime residing in the brain. But as the twentieth century progressed, what was once an innovative viewpoint quickly fizzled out andsociological perspectives took center stage. During that time no criminologist worth his or her salt would have anything to do with an anatomy of violence or the biology of bad behavior.
    Except, that is, the sociologist whose ghost lingers close to me beside the fireplace in this upstairs library overlooking Locust Street. Marvin Wolfgang documented in a far-reaching historical analysis of Cesare Lombroso that never in the history of criminology has a person been simultaneously more eulogized and more condemned. 1 He noted how Lombroso continues to be held up as a straw man for attack by those hostile to a biological theory of crime causation. He recognized the clear limitations in Lombroso’s research, yet simultaneously saw the enormous contributions that this Italian made.
    Toward the end of his own career, Wolfgang himself became convinced that there was—in part—a biological, cerebral basis to crime. His mentor Thorsten Sellin similarly believed that Lombroso’s biological perspective, focusing as it did on the criminal rather than the crime, was unprecedented in its vitality and influence. 2 Sharing their home and library as I do at this moment, I can hardly disagree with them.
    Yet most in the field of criminology would disagree. Biological research on violence was vilified in the 1970s and 1980s, during my formative years as a scientist. Amid interdisciplinary rivalries the perception was that researchers like me were at best biological determinists who ignored social processes—and at worstracisteugenicists.
    Perhaps because of a rebellious and stubborn streak running through me, that negative perspective has never deterred me throughout my thirty-five years of researching the biology of crime. Nevertheless, working as I have within the