Unfair by Adam Benforado Page A

understood that risk, did not want to be incarcerated, and seemed to know that what he was doing was wrong, he began to solicit sex from the staff at the rehabilitation facility.
    Oft was kicked out of the program, of course, and was set to be sentenced the next day, when he developed an intense headache.It was so bad that he had to go to the hospital.But no sooner had his neurological examination begun than he was propositioning the women in the room and openly discussing his fear that he would rape his landlady.
    With his bad behavior in clear evidence, the doctors might have written off the headache as a mere ruse to delay going to prison, but instead they ordered a brain scan.What they found was staggering: a tumor, as big as an egg, in the right orbitofrontal area.
    The surgery to remove it provided similarly stunning results: with the tumor excised, Oft lost all interest in pornography and easily completed the Sexaholics Anonymous program that had previously been such a struggle.Seven months later, he was permitted to return home.
    Oft’s apparent recovery, however, did not last.By October 2001, his headache had reappeared—as had his secret collection of explicit materials. Were the two again connected?Sure enough, when doctors ordered another brain scan, they found that the tumor had grown back.And with a second surgery, in February 2002, the sexual deviance vanished once again.
    Cases like these provide vivid illustrations of how deficits in the brain can produce profound changes in behavior.But it is important to understand that such clear examples are rare, and anecdotes get us only so far. Most of the time, we have a person like Masters—someone who has done something atrocious withoutanything like a large tumor or hole in the skull to go by.A better approach for revealing the neural origins of crime is to compare the brains of many individuals.
    Existing incarceration data has given us a clue about where to focus our attention.Our prisons, for example, contain a disproportionate number of people with significant mental illness, including psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (a related but broader condition listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
).Psychopaths have just the traits you’d expect to find in people behind bars: selfishness, superficial charm, impulsivity, dishonesty, irresponsibility, and lack of empathy or concern for others.And though they make up only 1 to 2 percent of the general population, they represent a whopping 15 to 25 percent of those incarcerated.The evidence related to traumatic brain injuries is similarly stark: while less than 9 percent of those outside of prison have experienced such trauma, roughly 60 percent of those in prison have had at least one such injury.
    Although the basic approach of criminal neuroscience shares a lot with early physiognomy, our tools have come a long way from Frigerio’s otometer.Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans capture the structure of the brain at a moment in time. You can think about the images they produce as a snapshot of the contents of our skulls: an interior brain Polaroid.Their primary value comes in revealing trauma, disease, or abnormality: they can show whether a person has an egg-sized tumor or an abnormally small amount of tissue in a particular area of the brain.A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, by contrast, reveals which areas of the brain are recruiting more oxygenated blood
over time
—that is, it gives us a sense of where neural activity is concentrated when a person is being asked a question or looking at a series of images (such as sexually explicit pictures of adults and children).This neuroimaging technology has allowed us to identify correlations betweenbrain structures, on the one hand, and activities and behaviors, on the other.
    Take the prefrontal cortex.Pathological liars, highly aggressive