Note: The following is part of the series of full chapter excerpts from my latest book, a collaborative effort with television’s Cop Doc, Dr. Richard Weinblatt, Tasers, Abortions and Parenting: Behind the Curtain of Policing America. Click on the title to obtain your copy of the complete book today.
“They say it’s impossible to stop now, Evelyn Torres, 48, of the Bronx, said of her son’s use of antipsychotics since he received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at age 3. Seven years later, the boy is now also afflicted with weight and heart problems. But Ms. Torres credits Medicaid for making the boy’s mental and physical conditions manageable. “They’re helping with everything,” she said.”
from The New York Times article “Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics” by Duff Wilson (December 11th, 2009)
Bipolar disorder at age 3?!? Weight and heart problems at age 10?!?
While there is a certain degree of debate as to when and what children can recall in terms of early life events, it is generally believed that the vast majority can “come up with only a handful of memories from between the ages of 3 and 7.”
Commonly referred to as childhood amnesia which based upon recent studies suggest that memory encoding begins gradually at birth reaching adult levels by age 2 or 3, I cannot help but wonder with all that is happening it is hard to understand how any reputable physician can diagnose a bipolar disorder in a three year old, let alone justify the need to prescribe antipsychotic drugs.
Like the controversial discovery of a crime gene as reported in a July 2nd, 2008 article in which researchers from King’s College London claim to have found that boys who have a version of a gene are much more likely to leave the rails if they are abused when young, the concern “that young people could be labelled as potential troublemakers before they have committed a crime” is as disconcerting as the aforementioned bipolar diagnosis.
The fact that antipsychotic drugs are routinely prescribed to children as young as 3, also provides credence in terms of the fear expressed by crime gene critics that “governments may turn to the use of drugs to fight against crime, rather than tackling deep-rooted social problems.”
When you consider that antipsychotic prescriptions “are the single biggest drug expenditure for Medicaid, costing the program $7.9 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which the data is available,” a certain level of trepidation in this area would seem to be somewhat reasonable.
Leaving the broader debate that attempting to link a criminal disposition to a gene is a form of eugenics, which critics feel would target poor minority children, it is our position that “crime” is a cultural concept, and not a biological entity. As a result, assigning blame to a particular DNA string or specific gene like the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in a 3 year old perhaps borders on the ridiculous.
Five time New York Times bestselling author Larry Winget, whose book “Your Kids Are Your Own Fault” advocates a nurture versus nature view regarding child development, unapologetically places childhood behavior and ultimately adult conduct squarely and forever on the shoulders of the parents.
Winget points to a number of disturbing trends that would seem to support his view, beginning with his assertion that studies seem to indicate that parents on average only spend 3 1/2 minutes per week in meaningful conversation with their children. Think about that for a moment, 3 1/2 minutes! What can you possibly teach your children and more importantly, what can your children learn about you in 3 1/2 minutes?
Perhaps this is the isolating starting point that leads to 27 out of 29 children being obese, or why only 70% of all kids graduate from high school in an era where those with university degrees are finding it tough to land a job.
Regardless of origins, there is interesting data that can be used to validate both the nurture versus nature position. One such example that immediately comes to mind was also referenced in an earlier chapter of this book. We are of course talking about statistics presented by the former spokesperson for San Quentin State Prison in California Vernell Crittendon during a recent appearance on the Larry King Show. Specifically were Crittendon’s findings that a good percentage of the current prison population was 3rd and 4th generation criminals from the same family lineage.
Those who believe that a crime gene does in fact exist could point to this ancestral trend as well as a 1984 study of Danish males that were raised by adoptive parents as proof that their theories have merit.
In Jeff Milder’s November 1995 article titled “Eugenics Resurrected: Is Crime in the Genes,” results from the Danish study showed that children of repeat criminals though adopted, “were about twice as likely to be criminals themselves as the children of non-criminals.”
While the majority of genetic determinists as they are called are usually more subtle in that they postulate “the existence of genes for certain crime-encouraging tendencies such as impulsiveness and violence versus a specific criminal act such as rape and murder would tend to lend support to the Danish findings, to those who support the nurture over nature view there remain serious flaws.
Referencing a commonly cited statistic which indicates that while only accounting for 10% of the overall population, blacks in America are responsible for “one-half of all rape and murder arrests, and about two-thirds of all robbery arrests,” Milder is quick to point out that there are numerous explanations for these statistical outcomes which he outlines as follows:
“(1) blacks are more frequently the victims of economic inequality, and poor people commit more crimes than rich people, regardless of race, (2) blacks are treated by society in a way that encourages them to commit crimes, (3) blacks are more frequently arrested than whites for crimes they have committed or (4) that a large percentage of blacks contain genes predisposing them to crime. All of the explanations (or a combination of them) could explain the correlation between race and crime. But which is correct?”
Beyond the variable combination of circumstances listed above, and perhaps others that we haven’t even considered, the growing trend on the part of physicians to prescribe powerful antipsychotic drugs to children who come from a lower socio-economic class is telling.
In the December 2009 New York Times article, it was pointed out that more than 4 percent of the patients aged 6 to 17 in Medicade fee-for-service programs received antipsychotic drugs, compared with less than 1 percent of privately insured children and adolescents.
Similar to the questions we raised in chapter 3 regarding abortion, and chapter 4 regarding socio-economic influence on crime statistics, the nature versus nurture paradigm creates a which came first, the chicken or the egg scenario. It also challenges one of the key tenets of the Declaration of Independence which states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” We didn’t see a but if their black, or if they are of a lower social status in there, did you?
Unlike the September 6th, 1976 Time Magazine article “The World: Equal Before God But Not Men,” in which South Africa’s Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons James Thomas Kruger made the statement that “All men are equal before God, but all men are not equal before men because the differences are obvious,” the principles of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, through which Lincoln believed the United States Constitution “should be interpreted is what makes this country great if not always in practice at least in intent.
Facing riots at the time of the article’s publication, and blaming it on “the black-power movement based in America,” Kruger went on to say that even though South African blacks sing songs such as We Shall Overcome, they are wrong as it is the apartheid system and its National Party government that shall overcome.
Kruger then concluded his oratory diatribe with the remark that “The black knows his place, and if not, I’ll tell him his place.”
The inference by the South African Minister of Justice is pretty clear in its suggestion that blacks are somehow genetically inferior at birth. If, as any reasonable human being would conclude, that Kruger’s remarks are not only racist but outright wrong, then how can one support the theory of a genetic pre-disposition towards crime in any form, even the muted down tendencies view?
Now some may again argue that observations such as the one presented by Crittendon that the general prison population is mostly comprised of 3rd and 4th generation criminals makes it difficult if not impossible to discount the existence of a crime gene that is passed from one generation to the next.
But we will once again turn to Hollywood, and in particular the movie Trading Places.
Trading Places continues to be an enormously popular comedy in which the wealthy Duke brothers tackle the nature versus nurture debate through a simple experiment in which the wager is a single dollar.
Recognizing the fact that their firm’s well-heeled managing director Louis Winthorpe III (played convincingly by Dan Aykroyd) was raised in affluence, they decide to expose him to the underbelly of modern society by setting him up to be arrested and then stripped of all worldly possessions, in an effort see if he would turn to a life of crime.
On the other side of this observatory coin, they bail out jail the poor street hustler Billy Ray Valentine (the irrepressibly funny Eddie Murphy), and literally drop him into Winthorpe’s present day life style including his home and his faithful butler. The belief here is that given the opportunity to live life at the upper echelon of society, Valentine would abandon his criminal ways and become a productive member of the community.
While the story concludes with the disposed Winthorpe teaming-up with the newly self-aware Valentine to exact their revenge on the Dukes which sees the brothers lose their entire wealth, t was American philosopher and professor at Harvard University Stanley Cavell’s views on the movie that are most telling.
Drawing comparisons to the opera The Marriage of Figaro, Cavell states that it “is mostly the idea of resourceful and sociable young and poor overcoming with various disguises the conniving of the unsociable old and rich but with no sense that the old may be redeemed by a recognition of their faults and no revolutionary desire to see the world formed on a new basis” that provides the level playing field of accessibility to equal opportunity regardless of race or origins.
We think that this is a powerful observation on many levels as our reference to an Australian Criminology Institute study in the previous chapter, which concluded that there is a correlation between drug-related crime and factors such as poor social support systems, early contact with government services, difficulty in school and membership in deviant peer groups, and the lack of access to economic support systems, means that we should indeed focus on tackling “the deep-rooted social problems” presented by the critics of the King’s College London research.
Even though far reaching social change is not likely to happen overnight, or for that matter anytime soon, we can take an all important first step forward within the confines of our own homes, and how we act as parents.
In essence and in a very real and meaningful way, we as parents can take ownership of our responsibilities in terms of how we interact with, and raise our young.
This recognition and acceptance of our responsibilities is a fact that even the courts now take into account with juvenile offenders and the issuance of parental orders.
In England for example, and more specifically Wales where according to a 2008 children’s charity NCH report “1 in 10 young people have been affected by gun or knife crime,” a Parenting Order as it is called is made against the parent or parents of a child which has been given an “Anti-Social Behavior Order, has been convicted of an offence, or the parent has been convicted of an offence under section 443 or 444” of the country’s 1996 Education Act.
The Act, which grants local authorities with “more responsibilities with regards to strategies for reducing crime and disorder,” and in particularly as it relates to ” racially aggravated offences,” is an interesting concept relative to its intention. Specifically, the parent is held accountable for keeping their children in check so as to prevent similar or repeat behavior resulting in further run ins with law enforcement.
Usually put into force for a period of 12 months, there are of course restrictions in that the order must not interfere with either the parents’ or child’s religious beliefs, or in any way conflicts with times in which the parent or parents are normally at work or when the child is attending school.
This being said the data regarding the effectiveness of Parenting Orders in the UK requires further research relative to overall effectiveness, however establishing some degree of accountability is a good first step But would it be effective in the West and in particular in the United States?
A May 27th, 1996 article “Should parents be responsible for the crimes of their children?” related the story of a Detroit couple who were found guilty of “failing to control their 16-year-old son,” who while under the influence of marijuana committed several burglaries.
The couple, Susan and Anthony Provenzino, were each ordered to pay a fine of $1,000 plus court costs for their purported failure to in effect properly parent their son, which violated a city ordinance that “parents must exercise reasonable control over children under 18.”
What is interesting is what one would define as being reasonable control, especially in an era where corporal punishment can land the parent in the equivalent of legal hot water pretty quickly.
While we are not going to debate the merits or drawbacks of corporal punishment within the confines of this book, nor for that matter any specific parenting technique, it is nonetheless a very interesting dilemma. A dilemma which had perhaps an even greater sense of urgency in 1996 based on FBI statistics which indicated that between 1984 and 1994 juvenile arrests for violent crime had increased by a whopping 75%.
According to the article, there were at the time at least 10 states including California, Oregon, Illinois and Virginia that had similar community ordinances to the one in Michigan.
The far reaching issue with such ordinances according to Keith W. Waters, who in 1996 was the president of the National Bar Association, is that they go against the grain of “American law,” which has never in its history held one person or persons accountable for the misdeeds of another. Or as Waters put it, “a criminal act is the conscious choice of a wrongdoer and not of another person, parent or friend.”
Even though Waters believes that there is no basis within the criminal justice system to hold a parent accountable for the actions of a child, he does not preclude culpability within the framework of the civil courts. One example according to Waters is “if a child throws a brick at a car, parents should be held responsible for the monetary damages.”
Many in law enforcement seem to have shared Waters’ general sentiments regarding criminal liability.
Ira Harris, who in 1996 was the executive director of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives “NOBLE,” whose membership today is comprised of 6,000 police chiefs and law enforcement officers at the federal, state and local levels expressed the opinion that there should not be a “:mandatory law across the board” holding parents responsible for their children’s crimes. His reasoning was that many parents might be “innocently caught up” should such a law be passed.
He did however indicate that as perhaps an alternative, a law be established that would review parental responsibility on a case-by-case basis to determine if there is in fact overwhelming evidence of culpability. That said Harris as well as the NOBLE organization as a whole, advocates to this day a collaborative and conciliatory partnering between schools and parents as reflected first in their July 28th, 1999 resolutions, and the subsequent 25th Annual Conference resolution that was adopted on August 1st, 2001.
Titled “Resolution To Support The Fight Crime By Investing In Kids Initiative,” the resolution referred to what it terms as both “rigorous scientific research and years of experience on the front lines,” which indicated a significant drop in crime when families have “access to quality after-school programs, school readiness child programs, help for troubled kids, and abuse and neglect prevention programs.” This would seem to mutually support the research findings of the Australian Institute of Criminology which suggest that “drug use” like alcohol have what can be referred to as “common origins” relating to factors such as a “lack of access to economic support systems, poor social support systems, early contact with government services, difficulty in school, and membership in deviant peer groups.”
If this is indeed the case, then the NOBLE Resolution is at least heading in the right direction in that the proposed programs, which the organization believes will more than pay for themselves through a reduction in crime and related punishment costs, a reduction in welfare and remedial education costs, and increased revenue generated by productive workers, transforms the problems of juvenile crime through the proactive involvement of key stakeholders.
By fully funding the programs referenced above through the Fight Crime: Invest in Kids School and Youth Violence Prevention Plan, NOBLE believes the troubled kids will ultimately get back on track and that the level of overall parenting will be dramatically improved.
This is a vastly different perspective than the one associated with the crime gene theories in which we are all ultimately reduced to a somewhat neutered and ineffective role of “the devil (or genes) made me do it” course of inaction.
In short, and by proactively taking the bull by the proverbial horns in terms of the programs highlighted in the NOBLE Resolution, we once again refer you to a point we made earlier in this chapter that “crime is a cultural concept defined differently around the world, and is therefore not a biological concept.” Therefore, and based on the concept of behavioral determinism, which contends that “actions are reflex reactions developed in us by environmental conditioning (re the nurture side of the nurture versus nature debate), while we has parents might not be held responsible for crimes committed by our children, we can certainly be held accountable for our involvement (or lack of involvement) in the very programs that have been proven to reduce youth-related crimes.
Certainly Burrhus Frederic Skinner, (who along with the somewhat controversial John B. Watson developed the view of behavioral determinism) assertion that “positive reinforcement is more effective at changing and establishing behavior than punishment due to the fact that the “main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment” would corroborate the NOBLE position.
Like the Broken Windows theory championed by James Q. Wilson and George S. Kelling, which was covered earlier in this book, fixing problems proactively when they are small (like children) “petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred,” while “major crime will, as a result , be prevented.”
However, according to the April 7th, 2010 article “After Foster Care, Kids in Dire Straits,” when the State cuts loose foster kids when they hit the age of majority (usually 18), the abruptness by which this relationship is severed takes a significant toll on their success in the adult world.
Under the banner “College is a Rarity and Crime is Common”, writer Harry Kimball points to a study by The University of Chicago which found that by age 24, “just 6% of former foster kids have a college degree of any kind,” and that more than “two-thirds of women have children,” while close to 60% of all men have been convicted of a crime.
From a “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” perspective States, many of which are contemplating the viability of parental accountability laws (in an October 29th, 2002 essay titled Parental Responsibility, a Deterrent to Juvenile Crime, at least 36 states had established parental responsibility ordinances as compared to the 10 States previously referenced in the May 1996 article), are themselves found wanting in raising and preparing the children under their charge through foster care.
According to Mark Courtney from Partners for Our Children, the children in foster care “are our children, the children of society, of the state . . . We have no business taking them into care and then keeping them until they’re in the transition to adulthood, unless we’re going to try and do a good job.”
Or as one non-profit leader put it, “We go from you’re in foster care, where you may handle $10 per month to you’re responsible for everything.” As a society, “we need to offer something for these young people” other than “Here’s Option A: Fall off the cliff.”
Viewing the issue of parenting and juvenile crime through the lens of law enforcement, and in particular former deputy Sherriff Gregory Howard Williams’ book “The Law and Politics of Police Discretion,” the example of citizen-invoked law enforcement is interesting. In those circumstances in which the police are engaged through a citizen-invoked action, the patrolman has the least discretion except when the suspects are juveniles. In the latter case, the discretion afforded the officer is substantial and can be affected by general departmental policies and organization.
The key point here is that even though police can be given a fairly wide range of discretionary power in terms of responding to juvenile crime, it makes more sense that a concise and proactive plan focused on better parenting and where beneficial school and related social services support is a much better option.
Or to put it another way, crime prevention begins in the home, and potential issues are best dealt with at their point of origin when children are open to receiving adult direction versus when they have already become hardened and cynical through abuse and neglect.
About this Chapter’s featured picture:
Imagine what it would be like to be locked inside a closet 2 by 2 feet wide, your body wrapped in a wire fence and bound by chains like an animal for hours—even days—at a time. You aren’t given any food. You’re 6 years old, and your parents have done this to you.
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Claytons-Survival-Story#ixzz1WQocXve6
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