Today’s Wall Street Journal features a sizeable piece by Raine as its “Saturday Essay.”

The title of the essay is “The Criminal Mind” and underneath the title it says “Advances in genetics and neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of violent behavior—as well as ideas about how to prevent and punish crime.”

It doesn’t get much more relevant to ponerology than that. And it’s heartening to see Raine given a platform to share his extremely important and provocative ideas in The Wall Street Journal just in advance of the release of his book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.

Raine’s essay touches on:

• The history of criminology as a science and its sometimes unfortunate devolution into pseudoscience
• The rise of neurocriminology
• The roles of genetics, environmental and developmental factors and brain structure and function in the emergence of aggression and antisocial behavior
• The political and social implications of a focus on biological bases for crime
• Recommendations for legal policies that account for our growing ponerologic understanding by both assigning appropriate levels of responsibility to offenders and optimally protecting the rest of society from the threats they pose
• Measures – including some relatively non-invasive ones – that can help significantly reduce the likelihood of harmful behavior in children that display signs of severe aggression

The article is accompanied by the video below. In it, Raine explains the relationship between diminished prefrontal cortex activity and violence, how such prefrontal dysfunction originates and possible treatments for such conditions, as well as how those with normal prefrontal activity but undersized amygdalae can also commit violence in a more planned and calculating fashion.

Raine also offers his opinion in the video about the Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon.