I’m not the biggest Tom Cruise fan. Sure, "Jerry Maguire" was good, and "Vanilla Sky" had its moments, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see a Cruise-inflated summer blockbuster.
My guess is, however, that you’ve seen him in "Minority Report," a 2002 science-fiction blockbuster movie based on a Philip K. Dick short story that dealt with crime and crime prevention.
In the movie, Cruise plays a cop who begins to discover that society’s way of “predicting” who commits crime might actually be fundamentally flawed. The movie ends with the implosion of the prevention system and the establishment of some sort of social “freedom” where a specific crime must actually be committed before arrest.
At first glance, a concept like this may seem outlandish. After all, society will never be able to actually predict the future, so why spend time even discussing such a concept, right?
Turns out, the future might be closer than we anticipated. A little closer, indeed.
According to the Los Angeles Times, researchers in New Mexico are beginning to see patterns in the brain-scans of convicted inmates… patterns that could suggest a certain inmate is more likely to commit a crime than his neighbor.
Of course there is little certainty here, and the science is admittedly in its infancy, but I cannot help but wholly swallow the parallels to Dick’s now-classic short sci-fi story.
It doesn’t help that something like this happens to be mentioned in the article: “But with further refinement, brain imaging might one day be considered in civil commitment proceedings, where convicted sexual offenders can be held indefinitely if it is believed they have a propensity to reoffend.”
Now THAT has immense implications for anyone who is convicted.
Imagine a society where authorities did have this power. Imagine if the police had the capability of knowing who will commit a crime.
This notion would, as "Minority Report" depicts, revolutionize the concept of crime and crime prevention. If perfected, it would dramatically alter the social construction of the world to a never-before-seen degree.
Such a change is unconstitutional, illegal and ultimately inapplicable within reality. Simply put, even if it's technologically sound, it shouldn’t ever be put into action.
What such a change does is give the state the sole, unequivocal power to regulate “crime” (or “pre-crime”), and if you’ve read any of my previous columns, you’d know I’m not a big fan of giving the state any sort of power.
Imprisoning someone based on a scientific notion is as foolish as slapping the hand of a toddler who is being tortured with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies before he even reaches for one. What has he done to deserve punishment other than be genetically wired to think a certain way?
At its essence, the fundamental implications of this plan require society to place their trust in the state and only the state, and this is something that is extremely foolish to get behind.
While crime prevention may continue to stumble along in 2013, futuristic notions of a world where crime is nonexistent continue to haunt the citizens of society that make it a priority to live strictly by social dogma.
Crime always has to happen before any implementation of just punishment.
Confess your crimes to Sean at spmccaul@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter at @sean_mccauley
