Friday, December 16, 2011

When Good Brains Go Bad

One day, you are walking down the street in New York City.  Minding your own business, you decide to sit on a park bench to relax and feed the pigeons.  The sun is warm in the Big Apple, and shines through the trees of central park even on this fall day.  Satisfied with your good deed, you leave the park.  On your way out, you stop briefly to pick up a piece of trash and notice an elderly person needing to get across the street.  Just as you see them off with a friendly wave and a toothy exchange of smiles, a bus slams into your body sending you flailing wildly into the air.  Fortunately, you are not dead, you are not paralyzed - you recover in intensive care, but one thing has changed: your brain.

Bad person or bad brain?
Traumatic brain injury is a serious matter, and it is more common than most people think.  The exalted impulse control center of your brain is no longer functioning, and your criminal pulse is rising - where before it did not exist at all.  Months after this fateful day, while hunching over a cane down the very same street late at night you notice something.  An elderly, but very wealthy individual has dropped their wallet, and though they seem to be fine otherwise, they just dropped credit cards, cash, and a checkbook all at once in that leather treasure.

Hospital bills, paid for; health, relatively good; but you just "have to have" a bit more in your pocket.  You scoop it up without a thought.  The elderly man turns protesting, and you smack him so hard with your cane he lands unconscious on the pavement.  A severe consequence of brain injury, you have now stepped the line from your previous injury free ethic - to evil.
Who is the victim?

When one's locus of control has been damaged - when that Xbox controller of your mind is missing one control stick to the point of calamity - you are limited in your choices.  Not only can you not play the game of life the right way, but when you do, nothing seems to work.  You cannot adapt, you cannot excel, and you certainly cannot avoid the potential pitfalls of ethics that everyday life presents.
Studies have shown that a history of traumatic brain injury is extraordinarily common among prisoners in jail, including in women. Is it ethical for prisoners who may have been previously functional members of society to be incarcerated for crimes that are essentially an extension of a damaged brain?  In addition, could treating traumatic brain injury reduce recidivism rates and be better for society as a whole?

Perhaps this is evolution's way of protecting the species in a time of violence.  However, in our more comfortable modern society such a response by a damaged brain is maladaptive, and one day it may be common policy to aide the repair of society's ill and forgotten incarcerated people.  When good brains go bad, it's bad for us all.

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