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Gene StephensChicago, 21/07/98"Technology against crime?"SUMMARY:
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INTERVIEW:Question 1 Answer We also have a lot of new kinds of surveillance. For example, there is the global positioning system, where we use satellites to keep track of people. Now we can track people wherever they go by using global positioning. One of the most interesting types of surveillance comes along with ubiquitous computing, where we basically put a microcomputer on your collar, in your house, and one in your car and your office, and can make a total record of your life, from the time you get up to the time you go to bed, and even hear what you say while you sleep. Basically we have a lot of ways to go about this, people will probably buy into ubiquitous computing because it will make them more efficient, more effective, so that they have a total record of everything they have done, and this will be put into a format that they can recall it at any time. The problem is that if you have the police getting wire taps, or things like these, then they will be able to have a total record of that person’s life. The United States military can now put your DNA bar-code on the record. Now a lot of day-care requires DNA bar codes, a lot of elderly centers require a bar code. I believe that within the next five to ten years the DNA bar codes will be omnipresent in our country and probably in many other countries in the world. Then we will have the capability to have universal dossiers, that is to say, we can take this information from ubiquitous computing and make a dossier of everything about your life, from your health day care to your criminal record, to your educational record to your psychological problems. So we actually have the ability to have universal dossiers of almost everything in your life. We call that intelligence information in the law enforcement area. There is a lot of research going on, particularly at McGill University in Toronto, on memory. They have discovered that all the important events in your life are on a kind of videotape in your brain. From that videotape we can force you, by putting sensors on some parts of the brain, to recall the event. For example, if you were a bank robber or a rapist, we might force you to recall that. This of course would be a heck of an investigative tool. We have a lot of other things. In our country we really think that criminals just bad people. If we got rid of the bad people then the world would be a wonderful place to live. As long as we have that attitude, then we are willing to use a lot of our technology. For example, one of the things is artificial ageing. Pretty soon, we are going to discover the genetic causes of ageing, and as we do that we’ll be able to live longer but we’ll also be able to force people to age. Most violent criminals are violent in their teen years, in their twenties and thirties and early forties. By the time they are 45 most of them calm down, their bodily fluids change. So we could take a 25 year old who has committed a violent crime and age him by twenty years without the need of imprisoning him, because he wouldn’t be a problem any more. If we really wanted to take all the criminals off the streets - which we are certainly not going to do because nobody’s able to do that - we could use various forms of suspending their animation - we suspend animation in dogs already. We could stack people up and not have to keep them, feed them and let them go. Space prisons on asteroids, undersea prisons where we would grow seaweed and other kinds of aqua-culture, these are all possible in the next ten years. We could also have robot prison officers, particularly now that we have artificial intelligence to run these robots. They would be cheap and easy to use. We already use electronic surveillance in our country. We take people who are on probation parole, people who are in community-based programs, and put them on electronic monitors. Usually now these are wrist bracelets or ankle bracelets, but in the future we will be able to have implants in the body like birth control implants. We already have situations where a woman, for example put her baby into a trashcan. She agreed to have a five-year birth control implant in exchange for not going to prison and simply being in the community under supervision. You can force people to accept an implant, or go to prison. So one of the things that we might want to do here is to have electroshock through the implant, so these people who have been fooling round, if they don’t stay where they are supposed to, go to work, to school and back home, they go out of the territory, then they get automatically electroshocked until they go back in their territory. This is a free will situation: you don’t get shocked unless you leave your territory; at the same time, we don’t have to spend a lot of money to get you if you do leave your territory. So that’s another possibility of solving the violence problem.There are at least three more ways. Subliminal conditioning is another one; we have mixed research on subliminal conditioning; we know that subliminal conditioning does impact some people at least, we don’t know if it is universal or not, but we do know that these subliminal sound and light shows can get some people to do what you want them to do. One of the things we thought of was a subliminal implant, which puts a message on a rotating basis inside the head, saying: do the right thing, do as you’re told, obey the law, be a good citizen, over and over and over again until you cannot think about doing anything else. When would we do this? Would we do this when somebody commits a first violent crime, or a second violent crime, or would we do it when somebody has a propensity to violence, or just do it universally, so we don’t have to worry about it?Another possibility is biomedical control. If you have a lot of serotonin in your blood stream then you are a calm, cool, collected person. If you don’t have much serotonin in your blood you are aggressive, hyperactive, a threat to the community much of the time. We can now create implants which drip different kinds of chemicals into your bloodstream to keep you calm, cool, and collected at all times. We could also use telepathy; we are now running computers with brain waves, or flying aeroplanes with brain waves, so obviously brain waves are out there, so we could read those brain waves, we could make it against the law even to think about committing a crime, by reading the brain waves. We could also use organic memory chips. We are going to use organic memory chips in the next ten years, that is to say, we are going to have nano-computer memory chips, which store tremendous amounts of information. You could look into your neural system and just think about it and collect your information. For police officers this is a real boom because they could have all the criminal records on their files in their head, walk down in the streets, see somebody who looks suspicious, run through their files in their brains and say, there’s one who has to be arrested and arrest him. A lot of people would be using this because it would make them more efficient at work, because if you had all this memory right at your "braintips", so to speak, then you’d be more efficient.And then you have another interesting way of stopping violence which I call mind tapping, which is to say hacking into the computers in people's brains. Hackers have always been successful at hacking into any kind of system we have ever set up in the computer world, so here you could have police officers actually who do this as their job, to hack and check out and see if anybody’s got material stored on how to make a bomb. Probably the ultimate of these types of technology is genetic engineering itself. We can splice a gene, alter a gene, delete a gene, insert a gene, and basically make a person with whatever kind of characteristics we want. So we could find the non-criminal type and clone it. If that is what we really wanted to do, we could have a totally violence-free society.
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Question 4 Answer So, I think it’s going to take a change in the paradigm, and that is what I would talk about briefly. We need to stop thinking of crime as the problem of a few people in a mean world, and think of crime as a problem in relating with each other that involves all of us. I have my students in my criminology class write a paper called "My Life of Crime". Every student in the class has to write the paper, and I have never had a student that has not admitted to at least one crime. So when I go into groups and ask them, how many of you in this group believe somebody has committed a crime against you sometime in your life, hands go up. Then I ask how many of them think they have done some criminal harm to somebody else sometime in their lives, and all the hands go back up. So we find that the crime problem is not a few mean people, everybody is involved at one time or another in the crime problem, but some people get more deeply involved. Part of the reason that people get more deeply involved is because of the kinds of problem they live in or the kinds of reactions they get cause a further involvement. Obviously, if we don’t trust them, then they are not going to have any reason to turn away from the things they are doing, but just try to get better at it. So instead of thinking of the world as mean people who have to be controlled by hard technology, we should start to think that we live in communities together, we do not all think alike, we may look different, we may have different customs, different religions, different ways of living, but what we have to do is learn how to cope with each other, we have to learn to be more tolerant with each other. Tolerance is a tough thing in this world, we are not very tolerant a lot of the time. Another thing is what I call moving to a peace paradigm from a war paradigm. We have always thought we had to have war on crime, war on drugs, that’s how we would stop the problem. But the peace studies which are catching on in a lot of my country are basically studies that say: what we want is peace in the neighborhood, not a war on crime. People want to live in a peaceful neighborhood, they don’t want to live in a place with gunfire going on over their heads, they don’t want military police in their lives, they really would like a place where we can trust our neighbors, where we can interact with each other, where we can revel in our differences. That takes a completely different approach, and we are starting those approaches, community policing which is growing world wide, basically good people in the neighborhood, seeing what they have in common, looking at the problems in the neighborhood, and solving those problems with the neighbors and the social services and the police. Law enforcement and other community groups are working in partnership to do that, and if we do that, then we can prevent crime instead of having to catch criminals. We are terrible at catching criminals; we catch hardly any criminals; even with as many people as we have, if we counted all the criminals who would be imprisoned, how many would we have. If we spent all our lifetime just trying to stop criminals, we would always be behind. Reactive approaches don’t work; we need a proactive approach, that means identifying crime, reading situations and doing something about them. Obviously high technology has a place there. I think that a modicum of surveillance is reasonable. For instance, it is accepted now that many cities in Europe, and cities like Baltimore in the USA, have surveillance cameras in public places. People can monitor these digital cameras more easily and even use key words to see what they are looking for without having to go through all the footage. I think that is reasonable in public places. One of the problems we have in our country is that it is used more in private places than in public places because it is business which is using these to spy on their employees, even putting them in restrooms saying, well, that is where they take drugs and we don’t want them to take drugs because that costs us dollars and lowers productivity. I am not sure I think that is reasonable. I think technology has a place, but I think it has to be limited by law, it has to be limited to public places.
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