The Genetic Link to Crime

Are some people born that way? Are some races more prone to it than others?

Several years back, I recall writing an article on this same very subject. I thought I had written it for VDare, but if I had, I can no longer find it. So, the subject of crime running in families came up again and I tried finding my old article, but I couldn’t. Hence, I’ll try recreating part of it.

Above, image created by Grok to illustrate crime rates by race.

When I was in Grad School, one of our professors briefly (and I do mean briefly) touched on this subject. I remember him telling our class something along the lines, “Studies have shown that intelligence is inherited. Impulsivity is also inherited. If you have a child who both has a low IQ and high impulsivity, then the odds of that child becoming a criminal go way up. We will not be discussing this in this class as the black community protested against what the research was showing.”

It seems there was a conference that was held from September 22nd to the 24th at the Aspen Institute in Queenstown, Maryland in 1995. According to Wikipedia, it was originally supposed to be held in 1992, but was cancelled due to claims of racism.

However, in 2018, the very liberal Atlantic Monthly published a story titled, “Why Crime Runs in the Family” It’s about the white Bogle family in Washington state whose “60 members of their extended family have been incarcerated or placed on probation or parole.” See, it’s acceptable to talk about them because they are white. Genetic predisposition to crime can now be studied again.

We were having this discussion about a genetic link to crime once when I was still on the job with the Border Patrol. A New York State Trooper assigned to our task force was saying the Troopers called it the “Triumvarate”, when you are in an area long enough to have arrested the grandfather, father and grandson. The State Trooper telling us the story said that he had twice arrested fathers, then later on their sons, but never managed to do all three generations.

Another famous case that can be studied (because he’s white) is the case of James H. Fallon, a neurosceintist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine. From Grok, “While analyzing PET brain scans of psychopaths and comparing them to control scans (including some from his own family that had been collected as “normal” controls for an Alzheimer’s study), Fallon noticed one scan that matched the typical pattern of low activity in areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality, and self-control. When he unblinded the data, he discovered it was his own brain.” One of Fallon’s ancestors, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his own mother, and one of his other distant cousins was Lizzie Borden, who murdered her parents…allegedly.

A lot of the focus of a genetic link to crime has been focused on the MAOA-L gene(s). The MAOA-L 2R allele is regarded as the most certain to cause violence with the 3R allele also being violent, but not as connected to deliquency as the 2R. Yes, the 2R is more common in the African-American population than in the white one.

If you like documentaries, National Geographic did an interesting documentary on the search for the “Warrior Gene” in their documentary “Born To Rage” with Henry Rollins. The link above has the full documentary uninterrupted, below is a small portion of it.

Above, they swab for DNA some bikers to test for the Warrior Gene. The results may (or may not) surprise you. (Spoiler alert, the lone black guy tested does not have it).

From my layman’s understanding, part of what causes people with the MAOA-L gene(s) to be so violent or criminal is that they have little empathy. Frankly, I remember learning about this, but with modern search engines still beholden to DEI, political correctness, or, whatever you want to call it, the truth becomes hard to find. There is a section of the brain that controls for empathy that seems inactive in a lot of pyschopaths brains. From Grok:

I don’t pretend to know what the “anterior insula” or “anterior/mid cingulate” region of the brain are, but it does appear that some individuals are incapable of feeling empathy, even when they want to.

There is one article/news magazine for which I searched, but was unable to find. It dealt with a chemical in the brain that seemed to facilitate brainwaves. The newsmagazine style video that I recall may have featured John Stossel and been done in the late 80s or early 90s. They were taking test subjects and showing them T.V. screens with static on them (aka snow or white noise). They told the subject to watch the screens intently for something to happen, but nothing ever did. During this boring activity, some test subjects had a high amount of brainwaves. Others had virtually none. People with fast moving brainwaves during non activity were found to be shy, introverted people. People with low brainwaves were often extroverts, bold audacious people. The extroverts often engaged in adrenaline junky styles of behavior like jumping out of airplanes, racing motorcycles, and doing extreme sports. On the other hand, the shy introverted types wouldn’t dream of jumping out of an airplane or riding on top of a bull. The adrenaline seemed to up the brainwaves on both subjects but for the shy ones, it was information overload while the extroverted ones were finally “feeling alive”.

Today, a lot of the subjects who were extroverts would be considered to have ADHD. Doctors prescribe them drugs that make them shyer and more studious than they naturally are. When shy kids take the same drugs, it can fire them up and make them antsy. Those with severe ADHD, the same drug actually relaxes them. Not surprisingly, people with ADHD have higher crime rates than those who do not. According to AI, ADHD affects approximately 2.5% to 5% of adults. Yet, 25% to 30% of incarcerated individuals meet the criteria for ADHD. Those adrenaline junkies are more likely to steal a car than the book worms. Who would’ve guessed?

ADHD is supposedly more common in the white population than in any other, but I wonder if that’s actually true and not just because the white population is more affluent than the black or Hispanic population. As a result, white parents are more likely to get help when diagnosing why their son is misbehaving. I do believe that on average, Asians are shyer than whites.

I remember being told in graduate school that the profile for a criminal is often similar to the profile for a hero. There have been famous cases where a soldier was considered a disciplinary problem during training, yet, emerged a hero during war. There’s the case of Michael J. Daly, who left West Point “After having severe disciplinary problems and continuously being placed on special confinement and walking off punishment tours he resigned his appointment after only one year to fight in World War II.” He went on to win the Medal of Honor, three Silver Stars, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. It’s a wonder he was able to stand still enough for Harry Truman to wrap the Medal of Honor award around his neck.

Colonel David H. Hackworth said that in his early teens he and friends would break into closed gas stations looking for cash. His adventuresome spirit led him to first joining the Merchant Marines at age 14 and then the U.S. Army at age 15. Hackworth supposedly had earned over 90 medals by the time he left the Army.

As the case of James Fallon points out, just because someone has low activity in the “frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self control”, it does not follow that they will necessarily become a criminal. There is an element of nurture to this too.

In the case above of the documentary “Born to Rage”, several of the subjects with psychopathic brains never went on to commit crimes of any sort.

In the book, “Whoever Fights Monsters”, F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler observed that all the serial killers he dealt with had some sort of emotional abuse in childhood. From Grok on the book:

One of the most troubling books I ever read was Wayne Thallon’s “Devil Incarnate: A Depraved Mercenary’s Lifelong Swathe of Destruction” about the life of Athol Visser (which may or may not be an alias). Visser says his mother died after previously being raped and falling into depression. He never says so explicitly, but reading between the lines it seems likely his mother committed suicide. Visser simply cannot bring himself to say how exactly his mother died. Visser’s biological father had supposedly died in World War II and his stepfather didn’t care for young Athol at all. Athol never called him father. Growing up, Visser tortured cats.

When he became an adult, he joined the Selous Scouts of Rhodesia where he raped, murdered and tortured earning the moniker “Ivan the Terrible”.

I have to wonder if fate had been kinder to Visser and his mother had not been raped, would he have grown up to be a normal adult? At one point in the book, he claims to have seen a child pulling on the hand of his dead mother’s corpse. Visser said he looked at the scene, realized it was intellectually heartbreaking, and tried to force himself to feel sympathy for the child…yet, he couldn’t.

Fox Butterfield, the author who wrote about the white Bogle family, earlier wrote another book on the black Bosket family and that family’s generational history of violence.

Like a lot of mainstream authors, Butterfield is quick to blame generations of violence on the “American Tradition”. But is it? As American Renaissance has documented among other findings;

If you go over to Wikipedia and check out their page on “List of countries by intentional homicide rate”, you can almost tell the genetic makeup of each country by their homicide rate. (What in the world is going on in Turks and Caicos?). The most violent countries appear to be in the Caribbean, followed by Latin America and then Sub-Saharan Africa. I am suspicious that some of those Third World countries might not have the best record keeping for homicides, and some might be experiencing civil wars, but genetics does point you in a certain direction.

Before I finish off, I speculate that there may be other genes that control the amount of empathy a person has. In reading “The White Nile”, Dr. David Livingstone describes the events of July 15, 1871 when Arab/Swahili slave traders opened fire on a crowded market on the banks of the Lualaba River in the present day country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The slave traders basically opened fire randomly into the crowd. Many people fled in terror and drowned in the river trying to get away. Between 300 and 500 people wound up dying.

“In the July 16 entry of the 1871 Field Diary, Livingstone writes that ‘the murderous assault on the market people was Hell without the fire and brimstone […] It filled me with unspeakable horror’ (1871f:CLI). By July 17 he had made his decision to return to Ujiji. On 20 July he departed.”

The amount of slaves they took was a small portion compared to the number of people the Arabs slaughtered.

When you read about the Barbary Pirates and their raids on Italy, Greece and throughout the Balkans, the Middle Eastern/North Africans (MENA) seem especially cruel and heartless. Supposedly, they have about the same amount of their population that has the MAOA-L 3R gene than the white population. That leads me to speculate that there might be other genes besides just the MAOA-L genes that control empathy. The other possibility is that the Islamic religion gives them cover for barbaric practices towards those they see as non-believers. However, I don’t see white people treating the Arab people in the same kind of barbaric manner. Look at the grooming gangs in England that love to prey on young white girls. The groomers are shameless and barbaric in a way that is considered criminal to normal white people, but not to Pakistanis, Moroccans and other MENAs who clearly do not share Western values.

I won’t get in to it too much right now, but Grok does tell me that there are at least four other pathways to empathy:

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