Description
In Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain, Oliver Rollins provides a much needed, updated interrogation of the neuroscience of crime. Conviction takes its title from the deep-seated ontological and epistemological commitments neuroscientists hold: specifically (1) that the mind is brain and (2) that new imagining technologies, like fMRI, offer a promising path to identifying the long-elusive biological correlates of crime and violence. This conviction has solidified into what Rollins deems the “violent brain model” – an assumption that the brain is locus of violence and criminality. But this is not the brazen biological criminology of one's grandfathers. Painfully aware of its problematic history, the new advocates of this science couch their research program in terms of risks, neuroplasticity, and a commitment a “biosocial episteme.” Rollins holds this glossy rebranding up to scrutiny and finds the science wanting, susceptible to same blind spots regarding the social that have long plagued the biologization of violence.