I have to point out that Crooks and Liars got something wrong. They point out that an Alaska Republican said something incredibly stupid (surprise!), but they got what Charlie Huggins said wrong.
Huggins hails from Wasilla, and he wants middle schoolers subjected to DNA testing to see if they’re going to grow up to be criminals.
No. We can’t do that, obviously, because there is no genetic signature for criminality, so it would be stupid to suggest that. But Huggins wasn’t stupid, he was mainly wicked. Here’s what he actually said:
With some degree of confidence, I think that by the time particularly young men, but maybe young men and women, are in middle school, we can already predict the ones we need to get their DNA samples,Huggins told a room that included the state’s corrections commissioner, Ron Taylor.Because they’re going to go see Mr. Taylor in a few years. That’s unfortunate but it’s all too true.
See? He’s not saying we need to use DNA samples to identify criminals before they commit a crime; he’s saying he can look at a group of 13 year olds, and just by looking at them, tell which ones will grow up to live a life of crime. He wants to collect DNA samples from kids he thinks look like crooks to help link them to crimes later on.
That old adage, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” tends to disintegrate into confusion when applied to Republicans — they’re so often doing both.
“Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
(I’ve seen this attributed to various people, but the earliest reference I know of is from J. Porter Clark, conveniently making this “Clark’s Law”.)
The party of ‘small government’ strikes again by demanding innocents hand over their dna material to the state.
Let me guess. The ones that are going to grow up to be criminals have a somewhat different pigmentation in their skin. I know he didn’t say that, of course. And probably didn’t mean that. But in the end, for most people, it seems like that’s what it usually comes down to.
I’m a substitute teacher, willing to cover for k-12. That means I’ve seen many children for their entire public school experience. Some young students that misbehave learn good social skills by the time they graduate, and some don’t. I certainly can’t predict which ones will become criminals, even though I know them fairly well. (I have made a few accurate predictions of which girls will become pregnant in high school, but confirmation bias prevents me from claiming any kind of percentage of accuracy.)
Additionally, middle school students are experiencing puberty, and they are very insecure and suggestible. To say to a student that they are destined to become a criminal is to set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is truly evil.
It should be applied based on the potential criminal’s potential to do harm to society. Meaning that wealthy congressmen’s kids and Wall St executives’ kids would be the ones most deserving of scrutiny.
My late wife went too a one room school in Illinois where she used to protect the littler kids from a bully. Now there’s a guy who you could tell he was gonna turn out bad and sure enough, he became the county sheriff.
Isn’t DNA mostly useful in identifying the perpetrators of sex crimes? The average bank robber doesn’t leave a lot of DNA behind.
The elementary-school counselor that I talk with has sometimes expressed concerns that a few students will probably end up in trouble, but never have I heard anything about them becoming career sex criminals. (And most rape is committed by aquaintances.)
I’d say someone who is thoroughly acquainted with a middle-school student could probably make a better-than-random guess at their future, but enough better to justify collecting DNA, I don’t think. Collecting everyone’s DNA, maybe, or implanting chips in all of us, or putting a mark on our foreheads, that would be fair.
And, for all of our sakes, if you can tell which kids are going to be trouble, you know that they need help. And you cand probably guess at the causes of their troubles, and try to help solve those.
To just shrug off all responsibility, wait for them to commit a crime, and then use all the force of the law to punish them is itself a crime. To use the force of the government to single out a few for labelling as future criminals, and then to shrug and wait, and then to use the DNA collected to convict and to punish them, that is far worse than a crime.
Once again, you got to understand: government is to be made small enough to have power over individuals, but not big enough to have power over corporations. What is considered a bug in the Republican platform is very much a feature.
The classification of people into “criminals” and “noncriminals” as essential categories is in line with this as well.
my anecdote is from a very different place and time, but I went to a very posh grammar school in west London. The senior pupils, just before they left for grand things, were elected by their peers as “head prefect”. In my memory, the best head prefect we ever head was simply great at everything, top academic marks all around, accepted on a scolarship to Cambridge, member of the England schoolboy football team, and a really nice kid as well. And within a year of leaving school he was in prison for armed robbery with violence. The only thing we could think of was he was bored with his future, it was too easy. Would have been difficult to pick him out as potentially criminal.
zenlike @2:
I’m sure it can all be handled by the same private contractors that run the prisons.
one the things that amazes me the most about the right wing priorities is how they have a very high priority of having a small budget all ways going on and on about fiscal responsibility and the horror of defect spending while advocating the most expensive ways to deal with things like this crime and criminal behavior. The cost of the criminal justice system and the cost of criminal activity dwarf the cost of education, counseling and other anti-poverty measures. It would still be cheaper even if all of those measure were offered completely free.
uncle frogy
Menyambal @ 7 wrote:
All of those social type programs also have the advantage of being more effective in preventing crime and criminal behavior than prisons and jails and threats of violence.
uncle frogy
Oops. I fail at block quoting, heh.
Menyambal wrote; “And, for all of our sakes, if you can tell which kids are going to be trouble, you know that they need help. And you cand probably guess at the causes of their troubles, and try to help solve those.”
Rey Fox@8: “government is to be made small enough to have power over individuals, but not big enough to have power over corporations.”
Brilliant. I’ll be using that in future.
PZ: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” doesn’t break down here at all — you effectively demonstrated both sides of that coin, i.e. (i) that Charlie Huggins’ statement is not stupid, and (ii) the statement was malicious.
Funny thing: when I first looked at the image at the top of the post I thought it was prison bars made out of the body of a Christian fish symbol. It took me a second to realise it was a coil of DNA instead.
Not at all true.
What’s different in sex crimes is that the perp’s DNA can be left behind in an environment where only one other person’s DNA is likely to be found: the victim’s.
Thus you can sample the victim’s DNA, exclude it, and have a relatively pure sample.
The DNA left by a bank robber could be anywhere in the bank, and excluding all the people who came in earlier in the day is damn near impossible.
The DNA is certainly left behind. It’s just not conveniently concentrated and not limited in the number of non-perp’s DNA with which it is mixed.
From a practical standpoint, it’s most useful in sex crimes. But that’s not because only sex criminals leave behind DNA.
Betcha Huggins has a sure fire way to identify children who are potential criminals for testing. You can just look at the stats for who ends up in prison to get an idea. And I betcha you can do a first level selection just by looking at them. Clearly the DNA info is merely for future prosecutions.
I’m a fan of your work, but I wanted to mention something that bothered me about this post. You write that Huggins believes “he can look at a group of 13 year olds, and just by looking at them, tell which ones will grow up to live a life of crime.” In fact, his real claim, as you quote him, is that “by the time particularly young men, but maybe young men and women, are in middle school, we can already predict the ones we need to get their DNA samples.”
His claims are still horrible, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not claiming that he can tell by looking, which would be blatant racism. He’s saying that “we,” which I interpret to mean a group that includes educators who know the kids’ conduct history, can determine, based on their history of behavior, who will be criminals.
This is still insidious. It’s authoritarianism of the worst kind, and it would almost certainly be executed in a racist way. But those who supported such a program could claim plausible deniability in terms of their racial motives because the racism isn’t overtly encoded in words. At least on paper, such a practice could apply equally to everyone, regardless of race. Huggins can also claim that you’re mischaracterizing his arguments, because you are, even though I suspect you’re right on with his intent.
Identifying potential criminals in adolescence and putting them into a system of humanistic behavior modification was part of the educational system in Aldous Huxley’s semi-utopian last novel Island [his sort of antidote to Brave New World]. 50 years ago it had a strong effect on the high school me.
Now all I can think of are ways that something like this can be misused.
I thought Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility? Surely phrenology would be the cheaper option.
Wonder what key identifiers Mr. Republican is thinking of? I imagine they involve the code words “hood” and “thug”….
Trey Gorden
No, the Wasilla asshole didn’t mean “we” as in a group that includes educators or any kind of professionally-trained observers. Huggins made it explicit that he meant any busybody will be able to tell just by watching:
ADP article
See, not rocket science. “You” can just tell, just by going to sit in the classroom with the kids.
It’s certainly not PZ who is overstating Huggins’ combination of stupidity and wickedness. Huggins himself already makes that clear.
Here’s an idea for Huggins to consider. Why not fingerprint and DNA sample everyone at birth and enter the information into a database? Avoids nasty problems with predictions.
What does it mean if a “genetic literacy project got” uses left-handed DNA in their logo? Something must have gone completely wrong.
martinhafner #26
Is that ‘left-handed’ as viewed from the top or from the bottom?