Predisposition, Predetermination and Grace

A good deal of comment has been provoked (as was doubtless his intention) by Mr Gary Pugh, a spokesman on DNA matters for the Association of Chief Police Officers. Mr Pugh was quoted in the Observer on 16 March as saying “'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large.” The idea is to register the DNA of very young children identified as predisposed to crime. I cannot help wondering about the timing of this intervention. Recently there have been two high-profile murder cases in which DNA evidence played a part, and a suggestion, quickly denounced in many quarters, about the possibility of a universal DNA data base. Is it possible that a kite is being flown here so that some proposal yet to emerge will look moderate in comparison?

From a legal point of view the idea of future crime is meaningless. In the criminal law of England a crime generally consists of two elements: an unlawful action (actus reus or “guilty act”) and the intention to commit the unlawful action (mens rea or “guilty mind”). So if there is no action – no actus reus – there is no crime. Even for attempted crimes there must be some action that goes beyond mere preparation.

Mr Pugh might well say that of course the children whose details he wants registered are not (yet) guilty of anything in legal terms, but they could commit crimes in the future. So could he or I. He thinks that it is possible to identify children who are - actuarially - more likely to commit crimes than others. This seems to me to make depressingly deterministic assumptions about the heredity and environment as factors influencing children.

I recently read “Freakonomics” by Levitt and Dubner. One of the more startling ideas in this book was the explanation of the decline in the murder rate in the 1990s in the USA. Pointing out that the decline in the murder rate was a sharp change from previous trends and that it had been completely unpredicted by all experts, the authors conclude that the true explanation is neither policing policies nor economic trends, but abortion. The young men who would have in their peak offending years in the 1990s had not only not started to offend: they had not even been born. This involves the assumption that the circumstances of the women who started undergoing abortions in large numbers in the 1970s were such that their children would have been likely to embark upon a life of crime.

This may be so in actuarial terms. This week however we remember our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross of Calvary: the deepest act of love ever. Instead of abandoning us to our predetermined fate, our Lord entered our world to suffer and die for us, and to rise again from the dead: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10, AV).

A Happy Easter to all.