Brain Scans Can Predict Crime Before It Happens

Orwellian surveillance and a law enforcement system on par with the story/film "Minority Report" are fictional in premise, but may be uncomfortably close to reality.  

According to a report in Nature, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again by analyzing the convicts' brain activity, effectively claiming that they can predict crime before it happens.

The researchers measured brain activity in a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release, finding that convicts with low brain activity in a brain region associated with decision making and action are more likely to commit crimes again based on an analysis of prisoners'' brains during computer tasks that required the subjects to make quick decisions and impulsive reactions, Nature reported.

The brain scans reportedly focused on a section of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain tied to motor control and executive functioning. Researchers followed the ex-convicts for four years after the study.

"Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes," Nature reported.

The researchers say there is more work to be done before they can prove the technique is reliable and consistent, but the moral and ethical implications society would face should the science turn out to be solid, remain to be examined.

The research was lead by the University of New Mexico's Kent Kiehl, whose work on brain imaging has been detailed in the New Yorker.

An earlier report by LiveScience details the ways in which criminal minds are different from those of the rest of us.