Unfair by Adam Benforado

desires.We tend not to pay much attention to the potential impact of other causal factors—like exposure to lead as a child or the pressures of being in a gang—unless they are utterly glaring (like someone forcing the perpetrator to act with a gun to his head).Normally, we stick with our simple “mug shot” account, which leads us to expect people’s behavior to be consistent across circumstances. Once a murderer, always a murderer.
    Sometimes that turns out to be right, but often it is not—and even when people act as we’d predict, it’s largely a coincidence.Our “mug shot” approach to explaining tragic events is skewed and unfair.By imagining most criminals as autonomous, rational actors deciding to pursue greedy, lustful, or hateful ends, we underestimate the significance of forces in the world around us and dynamics in our brains over which we have little control. Once again, we are paying attention to all the wrong things.
    —
    The soft tissue of the brain is the starting point for everything we do.
    What is allowing you to perceive the words of this sentence, understand their meaning, remember the contents of the previous section, feel the pages or device you hold in your hands, and decide to continue on to the next paragraph?
    The answer is nothing more than neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters.Take away these electrochemical interactions and that’s it: no thoughts, no emotions, no choices, no behavior.
    Even for those with no religious inclination, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels as if we have something like a “soul”—independent, purposeful, and rational—directing our actions.How could that
thing
be nothing more than neurons generating electrical impulses,triggering chemical signals carried to other neurons? It seems improbable, impossibleeven. But that is the truth.
    There wasn’t some villainous spirit commanding Masters to assault that eight-year-old girl;his behavior arose from the three-pound lump of cells nested in his skull. A useful starting point in deciphering the causes of criminal behavior, then, is to consider how the brain of a criminal like Masters might differ from a “normal” brain.
    Even back in Masters’s time, there was some appreciation of the fact that particular areas of the brain might be involved in regulating particular behaviors.Perhaps the most famous example was that of a twenty-five-year-old supervisor for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont, Phineas P. Gage.
    Gage’s fame all came down to a tragic and miraculous event one day in 1848, when he decided to pack explosive powder into a rock using a metal rod. His actions (perhaps not unexpectedly, to our cautious modern eyes) triggered a sudden explosion, and the thirteen-pound piece of iron was driven up through his left cheek and straight out of the top of his head.
    In an amazing bit of luck, despite horrible damage to his prefrontal cortex and other areas of his brain, Gage survived with most of his physical and intellectual capacities preserved.But as his friends quickly noticed, Gage was “no longer Gage.”Respectful, pleasant, and dutiful before the accident, Gage became lazy, boorish, and foul-tempered.The injury to particular parts of his brain seemed to change particular aspects of his behavior.
    But there is no evidence that Gage ever engaged in truly criminal behavior, and perhaps a more relevant case to Masters’s is one reported in the
Archives of Neurology
more than 150 years after Gage suffered his injury. Indeed, many of the facts seem to echo the reports on Masters.
    In 2000, a married forty-year-old Virginia schoolteacher, Mr. Oft, who had never had abnormal sexual urges, suddenly begancollecting child pornography and, soon thereafter, attempted to molest his prepubescent stepdaughter.As a first-time offender, the man was diverted to a twelve-step inpatient program for treatment of his sexual addiction. Any serious slip-up and he would be sent to prison.Even though he