READING THE IMAGE OF RACE: NEUROCRIMINOLOGY, MEDICAL IMAGING TECHNOLOGIES AND LITERARY INTERVENTION

On 26 April 2013, theWall Street Journalpublished an essay by neurocriminologist Adrian Raine promoting his newest book,The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. On the newspaper’s website, an image of a black-andwhite brain scan overlaid with handcuffs headed the essay. Clicking ‘play’ turned the image into a video filled with three-dimensional brain illustrations and Raine’s claims that some brains are simply more biologically prone to violence than others. Rejecting what he describes as ‘the dominant model for understanding criminal behaviour in the twentieth century’ – a model based ‘almost exclusively on social and sociological’ explanations 1