Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), made a statement in which he advises to put primary school children on DNA database if their behavior indicates that they may become criminals in the future. According to him, such a database would help preventing crimes.
The idea seems however illogical and against any democratic values that Britain has followed until now.
First of all, how is the database going to help preventing crimes? If you have a DNA sample that you can compare with the DNA sample found on the crime scene you can catch a criminal, you cannot prevent this crime.
Second of all, it is against democratic values to stigmatize a child of 5 (or any other age really) as a future criminal and keep his/her record in the database no matter what this young person will do with his/hers life in the future.
Third of all, what if someone looses the data (happened in this country before) or sells them? Than a person who has possibly never committed a crime will be treated as a criminal by possible employers, police, insurance company etc.
And lastly, if you want to target 5 years old kids who may become criminals, why not doing this. And than, instead of branding them as criminals and spending thousands of pounds to update your database, spend this money for a well-design program preventing those youngsters from becoming criminals.
In one word: why building up a system of punishment when we can work to prevent the crime?
See more on Guardian
Posts
1 comments:
The line of reasoning is probably that if you know your DNA is in the database you're less likely to commit crimes. We know, however, from American studies that things like this don't really help. Take the death penalty: has that stopped Americans from killing each other? No. Why not? Because in many cases of murder the perpetrator was NOT reasoning logically and rationally. In other words: she or he did not think she or he would get caught and/or she or he did not think at all in the situation.
Post a Comment