They recommended a less harsh punishment than people who didn't read the paragraph on neuroscience, five years instead of ten years. The people who read the neuroscientific passages reminding you or telling you that human behaviour is ultimately mechanistic, those people were less inclined to add on those extra punishment sentences. Another set of studies done by Lisa Aspinwall and colleagues presented judges in the United States with evidence concerning a murderer who seems to be a psychopath, and they gave them evidence about how this person's behaviour is shaped by their genes and they're shaped by the person's brain, and the finding was that judges ended up shaving off a bit of the sentence that they would hypothetically give.
They saw this scientific evidence as mitigating in a way. So, it's not just ordinary people who have this response, it's professional lawmakers, including professional judges. Now, again, the scientific research doesn't tell you whether this is good or bad, it's this shift of where you understand the human mind, the human behaviour in mechanistic terms, and it makes you less retributive. Narrator: So, given what neuroscience has already revealed about the human brain and criminal behaviour, what can the justice system do to benefit from the new research? Eagleman says that if we really want to rehabilitate criminals, we should start by looking at the effectiveness of prisons. Jail is the original rewire your brain solution. In other words, it's meant to punish people so that they say, well, that was a really bad experience, changes their brain, changes their cost benefit analyses so that they don't do it again, and for some people that works. It's simply that doesn't work across the society because people end up there for very different reasons. It tends not to work with drug addiction. It certainly doesn't work with mental illness. We now have drug courts, where people who are arrested for using and abusing, are addicted to drugs, go to special sentencing, get special things. So, the system is already recognizing that there's many people who have different problems, different brains, and giving them different types of sanctions. And so in other cases there is new things that come up all the time, as we learn, for example, about fetal alcohol syndrome, or posttraumatic stress disorder, you know, from non-combat things, people are, like, well we should take these things into consideration when we decide how to sentence somebody, because if we can treat the underlying problems, then we can help to reduce the chances that they'll do it again. Narrator: Eagleman says as the neuroscience improves, criminal behaviour that we don't understand now may in the future become just another treatable condition. It used to be that somebody with epilepsy or schizophrenia or depression, the idea was we can just beat it out of them, or talk them out of it, but as we've evolved in the sciences, we've realized that these are biological issues. So there's this spectrum about what we can measure, and at any moment in history there's a line drawn by our technology where if you're on this side of the line we say, oh, poor guy, it's not really your fault, you had a brain tumour, you had a brain injury, if you're on this side of the line we say, well, it's clearly your fault because we can't measure anything. Here's the issue: As our technology evolves, that line is gonna keep moving, we'll be able to measure new kinds of things and we'll have new names for new disorders that don't even exist now, so that puts us in this very strange situation where our current technology steers our intuitions about somebody's guilt or their culpability, and I think it can't be a just system that decides somebody's culpability based on whether we can measure and we have a name for it or not. Narrator: Many neuroscientists believe that the more we learn about the brain and criminal behaviour, the more the justice system will be forced to change, placing greater emphasis on treatment and rehabilitation for those whose brains made them do it. I believe the neuroscience is gonna help us develop better outcomes for everyone, and but it will also help us understand why individuals make bad decisions in a different way, complementary but in a different way than we view today.
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