UK Version of Orwellian Madness--Plan to Screen 11 year olds for Future Crimes

The Guardian reports that among Tony Blair's crime containment initiatives is a plan to screen every child in Britain above 11 years old to assess the risk of turning to crime--as though a valid screen for future crime existed!!!! The plan demonstrates government proclivity to use new medical technology--DNA--in abusive ways. In this case, to prejudge 11 year olds as future criminals who must be shadowed their entire lives.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the universal checks on children would look at factors including attainment at school, truancy rates, and substance abuse.

David Davis, a Conservative member of Parliament, who is the Shadow Home Secretary, criticized the plan to extend the DNA database to any crime suspect and the early intervention plans for children 11 years +. He described the proposal to assess every child for risk of offending as the "nanny state gone mad."

The Guardian challenges the UK government's claimed success in reining in crime: "The government claimed yesterday it had been a success because conviction rates of those on the programme had fallen by 43%. But actual figures show that the 7,800 offenders on the programme had been convicted of 55,000 offences in the 17 months before they went on the scheme and convicted of 31,377 crimes after they started, hardly a ringing endorsement of a flagship government programme."

The rationale for creating a DNA database is reminiscent of the discredited U.S. government-sponsored "Violence Initiative" introduced in the early 1990s by Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then Director of the National Institute of Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Institute. In both cases, officials avoid the real issues that need to be addressed--mostly socio-economic and family break down--and define violence as a health care issue misusing medical interventions.

The U.S. Violence Initiative attempted to provide legitimacy to an essentially racist ideology: two dubious premises provide the rationale for violence prevention interventions: (a) that inner city violent behavior may have biological or genetic origins. and (b) that "factors of individual vulnerability and predisposition to violent behavior exist" and that such "factors may be detected at an early age." [1] So does the Tony Blair initiative.

The initiatives' intervention and problem-solving policy mandate in both cases focus on children. [2] The department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University was a hotbed of the controversial government-sponsored research program aimed at preventing violence among minorities. An experiment involving 6 to 11 year old children of color was conducted by Columbia child psychiatrists in 1996. [3] [4] [5] The children who were recruited were neither violent nor badly behaved: they were singled out because they had siblings in the juvenile justice system--and the investigators ASSUMED they too would become violent.

The children were exposed to a hazardous drug, fenfluramine, to test a dubious genetic-racist hypothesis--the drug, (brand name, Fen-Phen) was the lethal diet pill that damaged heart valves. The researchers' rationale for conducting the experiment: they sought to predict future violence by checking the serotonin level in the children following a "challenge" with fenfluramine. This is an example of junk science and the debasement of medicine--these children's safety and dignity were entirely disregarded.

Press coverage prompted congressional hearings and a suspension of that line of research. [Link] [Link]

The principle investigator, Dr. Daniel Pine, left Columbia in 2000 for a high post at the National Institute of Mental Health where he is currently Chief, Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience and Chief of Child and Adolescent Research in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders. Co-author, Dr. Laurence Greenhill is Director of Research in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Columbia and Chairman of Psychopharmacology of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and co-author, Dr. David Shaffer, Chief of Child Psychiatric Research (Columbia) is the architect and chief promoter of TeenScreen which has its roots in the violence prevention initiative.

TeenScreen is a questionnaire designed to identify teens whose responses may be interpreted as being maladjusted. Such children are PRESUMED to be mentally ill whereupon they are referred for "treatment." The strategy for screening for mental illness (TeenScreen) follows the same strategy as the 1990s Violence Initiative. State and federal mental health officials have lent government support issued implementation guidelines to schools, child protective services, health care centers--have all been recruited as cooperating facilitators.

Both juvenile initiatives--violence prevention and mental screening--are cynical mechanisms for expanding the market for psychotropic drugs for non-approved (off label) uses since most psychotropic drugs prescribed have not been found safe or effective for children--they are used a chemical restraints to control behavior.

Given that 9 out of 10 children who see a psychiatrist in the U.S. receive a prescription for one or a combination of psychotropic drugs [6] TeenScreen is a certain market expansion mechanism.

References:

1. Vernellia R. Randall. SLAVERY, SEGREGATION AND RACISM: TRUSTING THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM AIN'T ALWAYS EASY! AN AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE ON BIOETHICS, 15 St. Louis U. Pub. L. Rev. 191 -235 (1996) See: [Link]
2. Alfreda A. Sellers-Diamond, Disposable Children in Black Faces: The Violence Initiative as Inner-City Containment Policy, 62 University of Missouri Kansas Law Review 423, Spring 1994. [Link]
3. Pine DS; Coplan JD; Wasserman GA; Miller LS; Fried JE; Davies M; Cooper TB; Greenhill L; Shaffer D; Parsons B. "Neuroendocrine response to fenfluramine challenge in boys. Associations with aggressive behavior and adverse rearing". Archives of General Psychiatry. 1997; 54: 839
4. PINE, DANIEL S., WASSERMAN, GAIL, COPLAN, JEREMY, FRIED, JANE, SLOAN, RICHARD, MYERS, MICHAEL, GREENHILL, LAURENCE, SHAFFER, DAVID & PARSONS, BRUCE. Serotonergic and Cardiac Correlates of Aggression in Children. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 794 (1Understanding Aggressive Behavior in Children), 391
5. Pine, Daniel S; Coplan, Jeremy D; Wasserman, Gail A; Miller, Laurie S; Fried, Jane E; Davies, Mark; Cooper, Thomas B; Greenhill, Laurence; Shaffer, David; Parsons, Bruce. ""Neuroendocrine response to fenfluramine challenge in boys: Associations with aggressive behavior and adverse rearing": Errata". Archives of general psychiatry. 1998; 55: 625
6. STUBBE, DOROTHY E. M.D.; THOMAS, W. JOHN J.D., M.P.H. A Survey of Early-Career Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists: Professional Activities and Perceptions. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 41(2):123-130, February 2002.

[Link]The Guardian
Every child to be screened for risk of turning criminal under Blair justice plan

A new-style "11-plus" to assess the risk every child in Britain runs of turning to crime was among a battery of proposals unveiled in Tony Blair's crime plan yesterday.

The children of prisoners, problem drug users and others at high risk of offending will also face being "actively managed" by social services and youth justice workers.* New technologies are to be used to boost police detection rates while DNA samples are to be taken from any crime suspect who comes into contact with the police.

The "early intervention" approach is part of a package of proposals on security, crime and justice produced by Downing Street which underline the scale of criminal justice reform Mr Blair believes is still needed despite passing 53 law and order bills since he came to power in 1997.

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, focused his criticism on the extension of the DNA database to any crime suspect and the early intervention plans for children. He described the proposal to assess every child for risk of offending as the "nanny state gone mad" while he said the Conservatives would have "great and grave concerns" about any extension of the DNA database.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the universal checks on children would look at factors including attainment at school, truancy rates, and substance abuse.*

A high-level review of the police that will not address the vexed question of force mergers is also planned, as are an extension of "summary justice" measures and tougher community punishments with the creation of specialist new courts. The plan is sprinkled with eye-catching initiatives such as MP3 music players that can be accessed only with the owner's fingerprints, crowd scanners that detect bombs and efficiency league tables for courts.* The crime package, agreed by the cabinet 12 days ago, came without any time-table or costings and some proposals - such as "hybrid prisons" to treat mentally ill offenders - are clearly labelled as "for the long term". In some parts of Whitehall yesterday the plan was described at best as "blue skies thinking" and at worst as "undeliverable". Opposition MPs wasted no time in criticising it as the PM's swansong after "10 years of failure".

But Mr Blair made clear yesterday that the pace of public service reform in criminal justice needed to match that in health and education. Despite some headlines suggesting the crime plan had been designed to cut the record prison population of 80,000, the 105-page strategy paper talks only of "stabilising sentencing" rather than cutting prisoner numbers.

"This is not an alternative to prison, it is in addition to prison," said Mr Blair before highlighting a renewed drive to focus on the 100,000 prolific "career criminals" responsible for the bulk of crime.

Mr Blair also focused on a proposed new "prolific offender order" under which several hundred "hardcore" career criminals would only be released from prison under licence for the rest of their lives. Those who breach the conditions of their licences - including a ban on associating with known criminals - could face up to a further three years in jail.

"These people have serious problems and targeting the offender means taking those problems seriously. And we have proof that it works," said Mr Blair.

But Home Office research published yesterday appeared to undermine the claim, pointing out that although the results were encouraging "no specific conclusions could be drawn" from an initial drop in offending rates amongst 7,800 "career criminals" on the prolific offender programme since 2004.

The measures in the plan aimed at tackling mental health and drug problems among prisoners were widely welcomed yesterday, with the Liberal Democrats claiming the prime minister had finally adopted their policies.

The package leaves a question mark over the future of the Home Office with a policy paper talking of the need for a "strong, strategic centre" in government to provide the political leadership to deal with the terrorist threat. But the announcement on splitting John Reid's department into two separate ministries of national security and justice has yet to be made.

The wide-ranging strategy document touches on questions of immigration and asylum, raising the prospect of a review of the impact of human rights legislation in this area and holding out the possibility of a "duty to integrate" being imposed on new migrants.

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