The Genetic Imaginary: DNA in the Canadian Criminal Justice System

Alan Belk, Ph.D., is a member of the Philosophy Department at the
University of Guelph.

“It is difficult to make sense of the plethora of social control
mechanisms that late-modern Western societies have begun to develop.”
Neil Gerlach, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at
Carleton University, examines our new and widely accepted ability to
identify individuals from traces of their DNA and shows how DNA
technology has come to provide a means of social control. DNA analysis
is not always adequately performed (e.g., in Guy Paul Morin’s first
trial), and is thus not infallible. Perhaps the press is tacitly
complicit with the justice system when it heralds DNA triumphs (the
exonerations of people who have been wrongly convicted, for example, or
the identification of victims of tragedies) because their reports
further the agendas of those who seek to “manage” crime
(particularly the police, who exhibit an extremely narrow view of their
role in society).

The author shows how government framed the debate over a DNA data bank
so that, despite the concerns of feminists and civil libertarians, the
social control emphasis of “conservative ‘law and order’ groups”
was reinforced and expanded. The web page of Canada’s National DNA
Data Bank states that “DNA analysis is the next generation of human
identification in the science of police investigations and is considered
a major enhancement for the safety of all Canadians”; Gerlach asks
just how and why we are made safer by the data bank’s existence.

A strength of The Genetic Imaginary is its insistence on the need for
ongoing debate over the amount of control the state should exercise over
individuals. Gerlach provides alarming evidence that the agenda for this
debate is shifting from the agora to the backrooms of Queen’s Park and
Ottawa. I prefer the agora, and we need books such as this to help us
reclaim it.