Category: Inequality

Prison Nation

It’s hard to find a better example of what today’s anthropology is about than the US prison system.  The conjunction of cultural logics (the importance of punishing crime), racism and inequality (the impact on minority populations), social institutions (politics and media), and neoliberal capitalism (prisons as big business) come together to drive a nation-wide pattern: the systematic incarceration of our population.  The United States now has more that 1 in 100 adults in prison, the New York Times recently reported.  We incarnerate more people, in both absolute numbers and percentages, than any other country in the world.  Those people happen to be more male than female, more poor than rich, more black and Hispanic than white.

The New York Times published an editorial on this fact today entitled Prison Nation.  The editorial goes after the cultural logic: “Many Americans have come to believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990’s.  In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is murky.”

It takes on the industry: “Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.”
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Poverty & Programs

This article, A Home Remedy for Juvenile Offenders, strikes me as relevant to our earlier discussion on poverty and the brain.  While I think the emphasis on “therapy” places too much weight on psychology and the individual, nonetheless I admire the overall idea, as related here:

The basic idea is to reach and help borderline youths at a moment of crisis, and turn them away from a more serious criminal path. By treating them in the context of their families and environments rather than in isolation, officials found that recidivism was usually less than half that of residential correction programs. The city says that it hopes its program will be as successful, but that it will take many years before it can be sure. Still, at roughly $17,000 per child, such in-home therapy programs cost a fraction of the annual expense of keeping a child in secure detention, which can be $140,000 to $200,000. 

My hope is that anthropology can and will add to this sort of work.  Still, I am not sure anthropology has developed enough as an applied science where it can point to clear and specific ways to make a difference in these social and material environments (please comment if you do have some specific ideas or programs).  So the recognition of individual differences (including moments of crisis), the importance of life pathways, and the focus on social context strike me as quite a good start. 

Poverty Poisons the Brain

Paul Krugman writes today that “Poverty Is Poison,” building off an article from the Financial Times that discussed last Friday’s session, “Poverty and Brain Development” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Krugman writes: 

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

The Financial Times article, “Poverty mars formation of infant brains,” provides some more detail about the impact of poverty through stress, inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins: “Studies by several US universities have revealed the pervasive harm done to the brain, particularly between the ages of six months and three years, from low socio-economic status.  Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s centre for cognitive neuroscience, said: ‘The biggest effects are on language and memory. The finding about memory impairment – the ability to encounter a pattern and remember it – really surprised us’.” 
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Addiction and Our Faultlines

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchDrugs are what cause drug addiction, or so is the story we often hear in the United States.  But what if social conditions mattered as much or more in who used and abused drugs?

 Many anthropologists and other social scientists have shown that social conditions matter, including Phillippe Bourgois, Merrill Singer, and Elliott Currie.  Bourgois’ book In Search of Respect, Singer’s article Why Does Juan Garcia Have A Drinking Problem, and Currie’s Reckoning are powerful testaments to a basic point: Addiction runs along the fault lines of society.

 However, it has been relatively easy for neuroscientists to isolate themselves from that view, and to argue that drugs run along the pharmacological fault lines of the brain, generating terrible problems on their own.  Social conditions are one thing, drugs and brains are another.

 The research by Michael Nader, Morgan Drake and colleagues shows convincingly that social conditions matter, and matter a great deal, at the basic level of the brain.  This same line of research also highlights that individual differences, whether genetic or social, make a difference in addiction.  The trick is that the research is done with monkeys.

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The Rat Park

Here’s a great article on some of my favorite research, how creating a Rat Park (i.e., paradise for rats), leads to remarkably low rates of spontaneous drug use rates among animal models.  As the article goes, this research by Bruce Alexander “led him to conclude that drugs — even such hard drugs as heroin and cocaine — do not cause addiction; the user’s environment does.”  The Rat Trap piece over at The Walrus Magazine goes on to examine the Rat Park research, and then Alexander’s subsequent work on environmental causes for addiction.

One good quote: “Alexander’s research reveals that addiction rates are low when societies are stable, and they rise at times of social disruption. ‘The extreme case is the aboriginal people,’ he says. ‘You don’t have anything identifiable as addiction until you screw up their culture, and then alcoholism becomes a major problem. In extreme cases, addiction rates can go from zero to close to 100 percent.’  Such spikes suggest that environment is a stronger determinant of addiction than chemistry. As Alexander puts it, if you put a carton of eggs under a hydraulic press, it’s true some of the eggs will crack before others, but the problem isn’t the eggs. It’s the press.”

Still, understanding which eggs will crack, and why; and how and why specific cracks happen, and not other cracks, all provide an important role for more proximate research.  It is that mix, of environment through individuals down to mechanisms and then back out, which is particularly challenging but interesting in addiction.  And, in the end, that type of research might lead us to develop theoretical models that will go beyond treating either environments or genetics as hydraulic press models, imprinting us with their forms.  In any case, for getting started, it is crucial to recognize the context, the overall lay of the land, and Alexander’s work provides us one good (though not complete, for me at least) perspective on that.

neuroanthropology and race- getting it straight

This is a response to the post by Doublehelix re: races and human biology emerging out of Daniel Lende’s post on IQ and environment..  The issue of human biological units and intelligence/cognition is very old and seems to keep appearing despite serious problems in the way the positions are most commonly framed.  This is a core factor in discussing neuroanthropology.  It is extremely important to realize that if you are going to use race as a biological unit then you must define it!  I would like to ask Doublehelix to present a definition of human groups that are consistently identifiable by a set of biological characteristics that separates them from other such groups.  There is no argument that human populations, both regional and meta-populations, vary in a number of biological characteristics.  However, are these evolutionary units or of evolutionary relevance?  Are there functional differences across human groups (once you are able to define what you mean by group).

Discovering shared frequencies of alleles in regional and meta-populations is expected via standard models of gene flow.  However, globally humans break the standard models of gene flow by their very low inter-population variation relative to species wide variation (not to discount the reality of a lot of variation across the geographical distribution of our species and huge inter-individual variation)…Doublehelix uses the Risch and other  articles to refute this, but ignores all of the work by many, many others (see below for a sample) that discuss and explain why one might see clustering of some allelic variation as associated with geography, and what that might or might not mean in an evolutionary sense. We are well beyond Lewontin 1972…  Allele frequency clusters are not races or even biological units…the association of function with specific distributions of frequency patterns of various alleles can and should be done, but has to be done with extreme care and we must play by the biological rule book.  If you are comparing biological units they must be biologically, not socially, defined.

The statement “As for the notion that race is not supported by biology, I ask: Why do races differ so profoundly in so many different characteristics, such as IQ, lactose tolerance, the resistance to malaria, skin and hair color, the effectiveness of certain drugs?” is rooted in a severe simplification…for example, lactase production is widespread across 100s of human populations with peaks in Northern European, east African and even middle eastern populations…so what does it say about race?  Malaria resistance via one of the 5 sickle cell mutations occurs with high frequencies in West Africa, but also South West Asia and the Middle East?  What race is that?   Hair color ands type are widely distributed…but not markers of unity…for example if having tight curly black hair unified groups then populations in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria would be linked…they are not.  As for drug differences, this is a very important and complex area of investigation where we actually see some amazing integration of social, physiological and contextual patterns (see recent BiDil research) but not clear patterning of socially defined races as showing any specific identifiable bio-based markers.

 

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