From: New Liberation News Service <nlns@igc.apc.org>
Subject: NLNS: The 'Violence Initiative'
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 15:33:03 GMT

The 'Violence Initiative':
Using science to scapegoat Black and Latino youth
Kristin Schwartz, Education for the People

(NLNS)--In the wake of the riots in Los Angeles, the federal public health 
establishment announced its funding priority for 1994: the "violence 
initiative"--a "psychological" approach to combatting violent crime in inner 
cities. Although the initiative has been presented in innocuous terms, its 
roots are in eugenics, the racist pseudo-science used by Hitler to justify the 
extermination of "criminal elements" in Nazi Germany.
	This fall, opponents of eugenics, advocates of responsible science 
and community organizers impeded the violence initiative by stopping a 
conference partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called 
"Genetics and Crime: Findings, Uses and Implications." The Washington, 
DC-based Stop the Violence Initiative demonstrated that promotional 
material for the conference assumed that violence and crime are genetically 
linked. The NIH withdrew its response to a storm of public protest, while 
conference organizers objected that the action infringed on their academic 
freedom.
	Allegations of academic silencing, however, carry little weight in 
comparison to the danger of using science to legitimate the racist ideology 
inherant in the violence initiative. "Stopping crime" has frequently been 
used as a euphemism for policing poor communities and jailing people of 
color. But violence initiative research is a tool for criminalization on a more 
insidious level. By providing "scientific proof" that people of color are 
predisposed to violence "by nature" and focusing on "sick" persons of color 
rather than poverty and racial injustice, the mental health establishment is 
scapegoating the victims of public policy disasters.

The violence initiative revealed
	The existence of the violence initiative was first revealed by top 
federal psychiatrist Fred Goodwin in a speech before the Federal Mental 
Health Advisory Council in February 1992. Goodwin said that his agency, 
the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA) 
and its sub-agency, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), were 
ready to take action against crime and drug use in inner cities. He didn't 
mention the causes of these problems--poverty, racism in hiring, inadequate 
access to education and health care--but stated: "If you are going to leverage 
[problems of violence] at all, in my view, you are going to leverage [them] 
through individuals, not through large social engineering of society."
	In the same speech Goodwin compared inner city youth to 
"hyperaggressive" and "hypersexual" monkeys and speculated: "One could 
say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, particularly 
within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing 
evolutionary things that we have built up. Maybe it isn't just the careless use 
of the word when people call certain area of certain cities 'jungles.'"
	After these remarks came to public attention, members of the 
Congressional Black Caucus pressured Secretary of Health and Human 
Services (HHS) Louis Sullivan to remove Goodwin from his position as 
head of the ADAMHA. Goodwin resigned, only to be appointed director of 
the NIMH soon after.
	As director of the NIMH, Goodwin will oversee the agency's 
program to screen inner city children. This program, which Goodwin 
described in a speech to the American Psychiatric Association in May, 
1992, would require teachers in urban elementary schools to identify 12 to 
15 percent of their students who exhibit "conduct disorders," "cognitive 
deficiencies," "impulsive and violent behavior" and other supposed 
precursors of "violent behavior." After further screening through phone 
calls and interviews--Goodwin called this process "triage"--clinical 
treatments would be prescribed for the children who are labeled potential 
"criminals."
	Though Goodwin did not say whether or not drug therapy would be 
a part of the "clinical treatment," some of his colleagues have been more 
explicit. James Breiling, a psychologist described by Goodwin as an expert 
on the control of violent behavior, stated in the Los Angeles Times, "Are 
there kids who have behavioral problems linked to depression? Yes. Should 
we give them the appropriate medications? Absolutely.

Historical Roots of the violence initiative
	Biological and medical approaches to social problems are historically 
based in the eugenics movement influential in Europe and North America 
from the 1920s to the 1940s. Psychologists and psychiatrists played a 
significant role in this movement providing "scientific" justification for the 
control of people of color, women, lesbians and gays, people with 
disabilities and poor people.
	Measuring "intelligence" was a pet project of the US eugenics 
movement. The IQ test was developed for use on World War I recruits and 
potential immigrants by Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford 
University and Rober Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological 
Association. IQ tests were used in the early twentieth century to "prove" that 
people of African, Jewish, Irish, Eastern and Southern European origins--
the poorest groups in the US--were less intelligent than "Nordic" white. IQ 
scores were cited during Congressional debates leading to a passage of the 
Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This act cut off immigration into the 
US from anywhere but northern Europe until World War II.
	During the Great Depression, eugencists proposed that poor people 
be sterilized to improve the national "genetic stock" and to contain the costs 
of social programs. These plans were never adopted, but inmates of 
psychiatric institutions were more vulnerable targets. Between 1927 and 
1956, 58,000 inmates of psychiatric institutions were sterilized under 
eugenics laws passed in twenty states. The majority of these inmates were 
poor.
	After World War II, revelations of the crimes of Nazi science largely 
discredited the eugenics movement. Eugenics, however, has continued to 
play a role in  public policy, particularly in relation to reproductive choice, 
health, education, and criminal justice. Largely in reaction to urban 
uprisings, the 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in eugenics-based 
research. In 1971, the NIMH and the Justice Department granted three 
psychiatrists over $500,000 to conduct research on the "biological causes" 
of violence and develop screening methods and possible "therapies." The 
psychiatrists claimed that urban rioters suffered from "psychomotor 
epilepsy" or "temporal lobe epiliepsy" and proposed psychosurgery--
lobotomy--as appropriate treatement, particularly for "leaders" of 
insurrections.

Old and new "clinical treatments"
	Today, psychiatrists arguing that criminal and violent behavior have 
biological causes no longer advocate psychosurgery as a "cure." Instead, 
their research focuses on brain chemistry. Studies on serotonin, a 
neurotransmitter that passes chemical messages between nerve cells in the 
brain have become particularly popular.
	Though studies have linked low serotonin levels to violent behavior, 
no connection has been conclusively proven. Nevertheless, the anti-
depressant Prozac has been approved by the FDA and several other 
serotogenic drugs are awaiting approval. If NIMH plans related to the 
violence initiative go through, a huge market for these drugs will open to 
pharmaceutical companies.
	Attempts to link biology and genetics with "criminal" behavior 
demonstrate how politics determine scientific research. Who is a criminal? 
What is violence? Systematic racism, sexism and economic exploitation 
underlie these definitions. The "justice" system, for instance, general turns a 
blind eye to crimes committed by people with power and money. As Ginger 
Ross-Breggin of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry asks: "In whom are 
we looking for violent genes? In Los Angeles police? In the people involved 
in the S&L scandal? In the people involved in Irangate?"
	In 1973, the Kerner Commission concluded that the cause of the 
urban rebellion of the 1960s was white racism. NIMH studies conducted in 
conjunction with the Kerner Commission found no evidence that 
participants in the rebellion were more "pathological" than non-participants. 
The NIMH Psychosurgery Review Committee concluded that 
psychosurgery was an experimental treatment and recommended that it not 
be used on "involuntarily confined persons or persons incapable of giving 
consent, either by reason of age or mental condition."
	These recommendations were reinforced by a 1973 legal decision, 
Kaimowitz v. Department of Mental Health. The three judge panel in this 
case observed that the US Constitution protects freedom of speech, that 
freedom of speech depends on freedom of thought and that lobotomies 
interfere with thinking. The panel concluded that psychosurgery could not 
be performed legally on people who were confined or otherwise incapable 
of giving consent.

Stopping the violence
	Will these prohibitions against psychiatric abuse be upheld in the 
1990s? Will public health agencies redirect their research, and stop ignoring 
and rationalizing twelve years of massive cuts to social programs? After 
Goodwin's initial "monkeys and jungles" speech brought the violence 
initiative to public attention, people have taken action both inside and 
outside the government.
	John Conyers (D-MI) of the Congressional Black Caucus has 
directed his Committee on Government Operations to investigate violence 
initiative research being conducted by the NIH, NIMH and Centers for 
Disease Control. The CDC, for example, is studying the "epidemiology" of 
the riots in Los Angeles. One of Conyers aides, however, told Education 
for the People that the Committee was finding it "extremely difficult" to get 
information about the initiative from the CDC and the NIMH.
	The Stop the Violence Initiative is urging people, especially those 
involved in the field of psychology, to write Secretary Sullivan asking that 
Goodwin be fired and that the NIMH change its longterm research 
orientation. Rather than focusing on brain chemistry and genetics, the 
NIMH should adopt a more integrated approach to mental health that takes 
into account the psychological effects of economic, racist and sexist 
exploitation.
	Goodwin et al. are promoting their work as cheaper, more effective 
and more humane than policing and incarceration. Certainly we must 
address drug abuse, violence and crime everywhere in our society. But 
labelling kids as potential criminals and putting them on heavy prescriptive 
drugs is hardly humane. Only concerted efforts to overcome systemic 
poverty and racism will quell the justifiable anger and frustration in inner 
cities.
	Nazi Germany provides an example of what can happen when 
public health agencies attempt to "scientifically" scapegoat racial groups--in 
this case Black and Latino youth. Violence intitiative research is 
scientifically flawed, racist to the core and must be stopped.

[For a list of footnotes and sources used for this article, contact Education 
for the People. Robin Templeton contributed to this report.]

Education for the People is a national progressive student paper and 
networking organization on educational issues. Their address is: Education 
for the People, 1806 T St. NW, Washington, DC 2000; (202) 234-0041.

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