The Molecular Leviathan? Forensic DNA technologies in life-stories of male prisoners in Austria
| Autor | Barbara Prainsack - Reinhard Kreissl |
| Cargo del Autor | Professor of Sociology and Politics of Bioscience, Department of Sociology and Communications, Brunel University, Kingston Lane - Director, Institute for the Sociology of Law and Criminology (IRKS), Vienna, Austria |
| Páginas | 241-261 |
The Molecular Leviathan? Forensic DNA
technologies in life-stories of male prisoners
inAustria
BARBARA PRAINSACK* AND REINHARD KREISSL**
*Professor of Sociology and Politics of Bioscience
Department of Sociology and Communications
Brunel University
Kingston Lane
**Director, Institute for the Sociology of Law and Criminology (IRKS)
Vienna, Austria
BARBARA PRAINSACK AND REINHARD KREISSL
ABSTRACT: The integration of forensic DNA technologies into criminal
investigation is often portrayed as a ‘revolution’ within the criminal justice sys-
tem. Based on 26 interviews with prisoners in Austria, we explore how they
related to DNA technologies in their life stories, and stories of their crimes. We
found no indication in prisoners’ accounts that the ‘forensic DNA revolution’
had shaped the way they see themselves, their life stories, or their delinquency.
Instead, ‘DNA talk’ was seamlessly woven into traditional accounts of male
honour and masculinity, power, and control. Our informants related to forensic
DNA technologies exclusively as a technology to solve crimes, and not as a mate-
rial-social complex that molecularised notions of self and delinquency. By reduc-
ing the person to an objective ‘code’, forensic DNA technologies do, however, add
new dimensions to these traditional themes.
I. INTRODUCTION
When DNA evidence arrived in our courtrooms over 20 years ago, it was
labelled ‘the single greatest advance in the “search for truth”, and the goal of
convicting the guilty and acquitting the innocent, since the advent of cross-ex-
amination’ (New York v. Wesley 1988: 644). Genomics, it seems, has entered
the field of criminology and law enforcement as a new ‘language of truth’;
DNA evidence is regularly seen as more reliable than other kinds of evidence
(Neufeld & Coleman 1990; Levy 1990; for a discussion of why this is the case,
see Lynch et al 2008; Aronson 2007; Jasanoff 2006; Cole 2002).
242 Barbara Prainsack and Reinhard Kreissl
There is a growing body of literature on the effects of the ‘DNA revolu-
tion’ on police work (Williams & Johnson 2008); on how DNA evidence is
presented and assessed in court (Lynch et al 2008; Aronson 2007); on the
ethical and regulatory challenges involved in forensic uses of DNA analysis
(for a summary, see Prainsack 2010), and on the so-called ‘CSI effect’: the
phenomenon that jurors or judges decline to convict a suspect if no DNA evi-
dence is presented; or that they take DNA evidence more seriously than other
forms of evidence (Gilbert 2006; Houck 2006; Briody 2004; cf. Nance and
Morris 2005). Not much attention has been paid, however, to the impact of
forensic DNA analysis on the group who is most immediately affected by it:
criminal offenders. Our study is based on insights obtained from 26 in-depth
interviews with prisoners in Austria in 2006 and 2007 (for more details see
below). Despite the obvious limitation of our data to those convicted of crimes
and offences — and the possibility that some of these individuals were con-
victed for crimes that they did not actually commit —, all of our interviewees
have direct experience with the criminal justice system, and most with crime
scene technologies. Theirs is the so-far underrepresented perspective of peo-
ple to and against whom the use of forensic technologies is typically
addressed.
A previous paper emerging from this study discussed the main ways in
which our informants ‘knew’ forensic DNA technologies (Prainsack & Kitz-
berger 2009). A forthcoming book provides an analysis of Prisoners’ Perspec-
tives in the Era of CSI (Machado & Prainsack 2012) drawing on the data from
these same interviews with prisoners in Austria, in comparison with data
from interviews with prisoners in Portugal. This chapter has a particular
focus: We examine how forensic DNA technologies are related to in interview
situations focusing on prisoners’ life stories and the stories of the event that
lead to their current imprisonment. We explore whether the widespread use
of forensic DNA analysis has influenced the ways in which prisoners relate to
themselves, their life stories, or their delinquency.
Such an influence could be expected not only because of the aforemen-
tioned view that DNA technologies have ‘revolutionised’ the criminal justice
system — which is expressed not only in the scholarly literature but also in
policy documents and in mass media —, but also based on claims that genet-
ic research and technologies have molecularised individual and collective
identities and concepts. Partly triggered by the hype around the International
Human Genome Project, in the last 20–30 years, such arguments have been
made pertaining to various kinds of classifications of people into particular
groups (Ahmad and Bradby 2007; Shakespeare 1995). Abby Lippman famous-
ly coined the term ‘geneticisation’ to signify an ‘ongoing process by which
differences between individuals are reduced to their DNA codes … [and]
interventions employing genetic technologies are adopted to manage prob-
lems of health’ (Lippman 1991: 19). Other authors extended and specified this
concept to particular ideas and practices such as selfhood (Rose 2001; Novas
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