The “Neural Phenotype of Poverty” and the Carceral Imagination

• In Event: Working with/against the Politics of Benevolent Neuroscience

Abstract

A brain-based understanding of antisocial behavior and criminality informs a range of mood and cognition management practices in institutional settings, including schools. This paper considers school curricular interventions that aim to ameliorate the ‘neural phenotype of poverty’ reportedly found in the brains of poor, urban schoolchildren (Pitts-Taylor 2016). Brain-training techniques targeting the prefrontal cortex are being promoted in some schools not only for improving poor children’s academic performance, but also for enhancing executive function and thereby modifying behavior patterns. In this paper I assess some of the research on poverty’s neural phenotype through an intersectional lens. First, although the studies I examine on the neural phenotype of poverty are ostensibly race-blind, I consider how neurobiologically informed brain interventions aimed at modulating behavior, or ‘neurocorrections’ (Hatch 2016), may be racialized, as well as gendered and classed—that is, inflected with social stratifications. Second, I argue that the institutional and real-world context in which the neurosciences are deployed render them meaningful; for poor schoolchildren, this reality includes the school-to-prison pipeline. I consider the neural phenotype of poverty through the lens of a “carceral imagination” (Benjamin 2016), asking how the specter of prison works rhetorically, often implicitly, to justify brain-based cognitive interventions. Third, I critically assess to what degree brain-based solutions and interventions are compatible with an intersectional and structural account of the causes of poverty and mass incarceration.

Author

• Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Wesleyan University