Tell a woman the story of Christ's crucifixion, and if she doesn't cry, she's a witch. In the 1500s, women who failed this test were burned alive.
The test - clearly and painfully faulty - was not publicly questioned until Dutch physician Johann Weyer wrote "De Praestigiis Daemonum" (or "On the Tricks of Demons") in 1564. Weyer correctly argued that many older women couldn't cry due to atrophy of their lachrymal glands. Prosecutors were presented with a dilemma:
reform the witch trial system or potentially kill innocent women. A paltry sum of sanity was brought to the system, and hundreds of potential deaths were prevented.
Stanford University neurobiology professor Robert Sapolsky believes that
today's U.S. criminal justice system has similar biological blind spots. Just as witch prosecutors didn't know about the lachrymal glands' connection to tears, we don't fully understand an untold number of connections between DNA, the brain, hormones, and other dynamic aspects of the human body. In Sapolsky's latest book,
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, he argues that our justice system falls into the same traps as the witch prosecutors of the fifteenth century -
we send people to prison, even death, based on incomplete evidence.
For example, 351 people have been exonerated via DNA evidence by the Innocence Project - including
20 who sat on death row. They're lucky, but how many innocent lives have met unfortunate ends? Or consider the cruel fact that
2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails each year.
Once inside, 83% of mentally ill inmates have no access to treatment, per the National Alliance on Mental Illness,
likely keeping them in a cycle of recidivism."The current criminal justice system needs to be abolished and replaced with something that, while having some broad features in common with the current system, would have
utterly different underpinnings," Sapolsky writes in
Behave.
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