If you have a child who has committed serious crimes, it is often assumed that you did something wrong as a parent, and people whose children do not commit crimes may condescend accordingly. But there is increasing evidence that some criminality may be hardwired, and that even the most admirable moral instruction may be ineffective in swaying a child who is so predisposed to gruesome acts that, in Clarence Darrow’s phrase, his murderous crime “was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor.”
