Violent Criminal Actors - Triggers to Violence

So when talking about violent criminal actors, if we could identify where they are right now and just avoid that spot, that'd be great. We can't do that. Can we say anything about where they come from, where. How do people get this way? When we're thinking about a violent criminal actor, you're really again thinking about, people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. And maybe that subset of them that we would call psychopaths, alright. Now, how they arise in society is kind of a challenge. You could make the argument that, psychopaths are born and not made, and they stand out even in a sea of other antisocial folks that might be around them. And it's a real challenge to criminologists and mental health people, and certainly the courts to figure this out because, there is kind of a generalized inhibitory pressure that would argue against people acting in these ways. I mean, at the very least, if you expose yourself to this kind of criminal behavior, you run risks of getting killed doing it. And yet it doesn't go away. So we have to presume that there's some kind of benefit, both evolutionarily and in the short term, to this kind of behavior. Now, when we think about where, let's say, a run of the mill, a violent criminal actor would come from, say someone diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. It's almost always, a very prejudicial to environment first, one of great economic disadvantage. You know, terrible neighborhoods, terrible conditions, underserved in just about every way. The families that produce them are, by and large rootless. When I've interviewed juvenile offenders with serious offense histories. The list moves where the household has changed residents, monthly, or quarterly. Just, there's no sense that there's any community to support them. And that, I think prejudices kids in a lot of ways because there's less pressure to fit in. They're constantly trying to fit into a new environment and often fighting to do it. They live in a violent super culture. Now you'll hear the term subculture and the term super-culture has arisen. Because there's just so much of it, you can't call it a subculture anymore. I can remember doing a field visit working in a juvenile court system, and, arriving in a house before an appointment. And watching some little 10 year old boys playing on a basketball court across the street from the house I was visiting. And no rims on the backboards of course, and the boys were playing execution style slaying. Three boys, one of them would grab another one, force him to his knees, and he pretended to quake and the third boy would walk up behind him and shoot him in the back of the head with a cap pistol. And he would fall to the ground. And they would all laugh and change roles and do it again. They're playing execution style slaying, in public. And no one's saying word, and there's nothing abnormal about that at all. It's not a violent subculture, that's a violent super culture. The culture itself is saturated with violence. In these kind of environments is what we call the failure of the good. It's very hard to point out anyone in the culture who's on the right path, on a normative social path, meeting goals moving out, they're few and far between. And so the social learning that a kid in that sort of environment will get is that work is for suckers. And that the violent get ahead, and those are hard to argue with given the surroundings. Depressingly enough, they have very limited sense of options that are available to them. Juvenile offenders that I've interviewed over and over and over again, view going to prison and going to prison for lengthy stretch, as inevitable. And they'll often refer to my time. Once I do my time, then I'll get out and I'll open a rim shop or I'll become, a professional athlete, but that the time is a given. 'Cause they're gonna commit a violent crime, they're gonna get caught, prosecuted, convicted and go to prison. And most importantly there's deviant instruction. In the household, and certainly in the surrounding neighborhood. There are people teaching them how to be bad, not teaching them to be bad, but teaching them specifically technically how to be bad. In my hometown of New Orleans, we had a case where, after people were scattered and returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mother and son returned to town, and within an hour of their return to town, the son was killed, because he got into a pushing shoving argument on a basketball court, and the perceived loser went home. And by the time he got home, his mother had received the story too, that he lost a fight. She said, "In our family we don't lose fights." She gave him a gun, sent him back to the basketball court. And he killed the boy he'd been in a pushy shovy argument with. In that kind of environment it's hard to picture someone turning out well, at all. And then those are the kinds of neighborhoods over and over again, you see in their backgrounds when they're interviewed. Now does that answer the question of what's the game? And in terms of why is this behavior persist? Sure, if you think of the , I hate to use this expression, but the regular violent criminal actor. What they're doing isn't inexplicable at all. And I think that's a failure of perspective taking from the good guy side of the ledger is that, we don't see that their behavior makes sense. It makes sense in a context that we have a difficult time joining, in a mode that we don't share, but it makes sense, it's a reasonable response to their environment. You know, the pervasiveness and the power of the violence that surrounds the violent criminal actor and his developmental years, forces them to define themselves, "Who am I and what am I gonna be about?" And as they reach a certain age under violent instruction, that process of definition becomes a very discrete decision. And that's a decision about violence. Am I gonna be a consumer of violence? Meaning is violence gonna be exerted upon me? Or am I going to be a producer of violence? Now that doesn't mean I'll be free of violence, but at least I get to hurt someone back, to quote a boy that I worked with. The, obviously not everyone in a bad neighborhood becomes a predator. Not at all. And not every predator comes from a violent bad neighborhood. So, what do we know about the predispositions or that discrete decision? What do we know about that? Well the, if you think about "The process of changing someone from perfectly normal" unquote, to hair trigger violent, you know willing to kill other people, over very minor things. It's a lengthy and involved process. But that self definition is something, that's called upon by kids in that position that really isn't called upon in any other world. It's hard to even imagine a world that would call upon you to do that. But it is a self affirming decision. In a sense, these kids are deciding, I can either be a victim my whole life, or I can start striking back, I can start getting back. Now, how that happens mechanically, what's the process of producing them if you will? I mean, there are as many theories out there as there are people making up theories, as many theories as theorists. And they're all compelling to one degree or another. But I think, again, Dr. Lonnie Athens, who's a criminologist at Seton Hall now, wrote a book called "The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals" in 1992. And he discussed a process that seemed to clear to him from interviews with jailed violent offenders, and he called that process violentization. And that's the, mechanical if you will process of turning someone who might have certain predispositions and might have certain, limitations, and how you take someone who's vulnerable and produce a really virulent end product. And that's what I think you were getting at. Yeah, absolutely. What are those? How do we determine those predispositions? Because obviously some people are, gonna make that decision in and of themselves without the violentization. There are, you'll see, a certain kind of behavior early on and kids with a predisposition. One of them is very low distress tolerance. They're not able to tolerate being frustrated internally having things not go their way. They tend to act out violently early. But it's very difficult in a lot of these kids to tease out, disposition versus their environment. What we call state versus trade. Because their environments are so prejudicial from such an early age. The real thrust now for predisposition studies is, studies of the brain, functional MRI studies of the brain. And more and more. The conscious choice element is being factored out. I think by serious scientists they're saying, some people are not able to interact normally, they simply don't have the hardware to interact with others normally. Now, if you put that person in a disadvantaged posture and heaped upon them abuse and limitations in their community and social learning that skews them in a certain way, it's hard to see why they wouldn't, turn out to be violent and dangerous. But the process of violentization that Dr. Athens is talking about, yields a very specific and dangerous kind of violent criminal actor. What I call a brutal, violent criminal actor. They're fully mature and violent in the process, and willing to fight to the death instantly and over virtually nothing. The process starts with that first step that he called brutalization, which is introduction of the young child to a world of violence. Through beatings, punishment, physical abuse, corporal punishment, fighting with other kids, with siblings. And it's often a kind of very intimate violence. People that will, beat and injure a child but at the same time, be close to him. And so it's not seen as something outside of the relationship but rather part of the relationship. In a second phase of belligerency, the child comes to see sort of the benefits, of being a violent person. It can get me access to a range of personal power that I don't have any other way. And at that point has to decide to either, like I said, become a producer of violence or a consumer exclusively. And we'll start trying violent gestures on at the earliest ages, what you'll see is posturing, acting as if you were going to be violent. Well that tends to precipitate a lot of physical violence. If you posture around people who are themselves, brutal and antisocial, you'll wind up in a lot of physical confrontations. And these violent performances, spur on the development downhill. A violent performance that goes badly, if you front up to another boy, and you wind up getting, notably defeated in a fistfight, we would think that that's inhibitory pressure and like lead you not to do it again. But in fact, the shame of losing the fight, and the violent coaching that you'll get from family members will send you back into the fray again. With increasing recklessness. And the last stage is vagrancy. Where the violent criminal actor is completely committed to violence at any sign of disrespect, of resistance. And I remember speaking, interviewing to a young man, a definitely mitigation case. And he said to me, "If they didn't want what they got." meaning being shot, "They shouldn't have done what they did." And in his mind, it was their fault. And you will see in this mindset, the physical responses of the violent criminal actor are almost always seen by themselves as defensive. And that leads to part of that, what we perceive as irrational behavior. Completely. It's a different rationality. It's, from your perspective, my perspective, it's completely irrational. There was very tangentially involved in a case where, violent criminal actor and his female companion were driving down the street, and she got into a verbal altercation with someone on the street corner, and that person yelled back into the car. The driver parked, ran around and stabbed the other man to death. And his claim was, they started it. Now we find that a ridiculous self defense claim, you're in a moving vehicle and someone's just yelled nasty words at you. But in his mind he was perfectly justified, they started it. It was a physically defensive response. Trying to put sense to it, I think is where a lot of people go wrong. Understanding how these violent criminal actors, are made may not keep you safer in the moment or help you to avoid violence, but it certainly should help you to understand why action may very well be necessary and it may not make sense to you, but it may be self evident from the situation.