Savage Spawn

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Psychiatrist Thomas Millar, in an eloquent essay titled “The Age of Passion Man,” written nearly two decades ago, decried the tendency of contemporary Western society to glamorize hedonism and antisocial behavior, and to confuse psychopathy, which he regards as a form of malignant childishness, with heroism (17).

  “Some [psychopaths],” Millar writes, “manage to cling to the omnipotent illusions, but the price they pay is the loss of their humanity. A few, like [T. E.] Lawrence and Hitler, manage, for a brief span, to persuade the world to endorse their illusion of power . . . but ultimately the game proves too real, and when the bloody facts can no longer be denied, the mask of omnipotence falls away, and the petulant child stands revealed.”

  Confusing creativity with morality and psychopathic rebelliousness with social liberation led Norman Mailer to predict that psychopaths would turn out to be the saviors of society (18). Mailer was as terribly wrong about that as he was when he worked hard to spring career criminal Jack Henry Abbott from prison. Shortly after his release, Abbott murdered an innocent man. Oops. What impressed Mailer were Abbott’s writings, summarized in a thin book titled In the Belly of the Beast. A coolheaded review of this volume nearly two decades later reveals it to be a crude, nasty, sophomoric collection of self-justifying diatribes—prototypical psychopathy.

  Muddled thinking about evil is by no means limited to the political left. Sex murderer Edgar Herbert Smith, sentenced to execution for raping and bludgeoning a fifteen-year-old girl to death with a baseball bat, was able to turn a phrase with some skill, and he conned William Buckley into thinking he was innocent. Buckley campaigned to get Smith out of prison, finally succeeding in 1971, whereupon Smith promptly and viciously attacked another woman. Smith then admitted that he’d been guilty of the first murder. Oops again.

  During the fifties, sixties, and seventies, overly romantic notions of psychopathy within the so-called artistic community led to tremendous sympathy being directed toward criminals such as Caryl Chessman and Huey Newton. How sadly off target. Chessman was a cold-blooded serial rapist, and Newton was a violent thug and a drug pusher masquerading as a political reformer.

  Perhaps the most horrifying example of good intentions paving the road to hell involved a charming fellow named Jack Unterwegger, an Austrian career criminal. After being released from a life sentence in response to agitation from European literati who judged his poetry indicative of a soul made whole, Unterwegger quickly resumed his real career: murdering women at a rapid, relentless pace. Eleven women in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the United States were abused, raped, and strangled to death with their brassieres. Double oops. Sorry.

  That’s eleven victims the police know about, because if Unterwegger was like other psychopathic criminals, he accomplished many more crimes than the ones for which he was arrested.

  A lot more. In addition to unreported crimes, another factor exists to deflate crime rates: plea bargaining, which by compressing several offenses into one criminal charge presents an overly rosy view of the incidence of felonies. This applies even to the most violent offenses. One group of serial rapists studied by the FBI were convicted of an average of seven attacks but in fact committed an average of twenty-eight rapes each (19). And those were only the known assaults. The actual number was most likely considerably higher. How much higher? We’ll never know. The bad guys aren’t telling where the bodies are buried.

  (I’ve been using and will continue to use he, him, and his because male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths and because males are responsible for a very high proportion, probably 90 percent or more, of violent crimes.)

  The wrongdoings for which career criminals are apprehended, put on trial, and incarcerated represent a very small proportion of the evil they actually commit. Add the fact that a small core of repetitive, habitual psychopaths who begin their criminal careers as young children are responsible for an astoundingly large proportion of the misdemeanors and felonies that blight our lives, and it’s easy to see why increased reliance upon stupid procedures that keep psychopaths among us, such as plea bargaining, parole, probation, and “alternative sentencing,” have helped create an America plagued by nightmarish crime rates.

  When smart police officials, such as those in New York, decide to lock up career bad guys no matter what the offense, crime rates plummet. The same goes for “three strikes” laws that incarcerate repeat offenders for life.

  When it comes to sentencing, academic distinctions between nonviolent and violent crime are less important than pinpointing the type of criminal at the docket. The otherwise law-abiding jerk who commits a one-time assault during a bar brawl is of much less threat to society than is the supposedly nonviolent con man who’s been preying on marks for two decades, because you can bet the con man has committed scores of felonies in addition to con games that have never come to light. You can also bet he’s unlikely to have much compunction about using violence if it suits his purposes.

  During a recent visit to a California state hospital for the criminally insane, I learned that the number of psychopaths trying to fake insanity has mushroomed because the bad guys are running scared from the state’s “three strikes” law. Though psychopaths are less affected by fear and punishment than normal people, they do respond to the threat of negative consequences that are severe and relatively immediate. Nebulous or long-term risks are likely to have little or no effect upon them because they have a great deal of difficulty, perhaps biologically mediated, in dealing with time and in connecting distant consequences to their behavior (20–22). For that reason, the death penalty as it is carried out in contemporary America, with decades passing between the imposition of sentence and execution, is unlikely to serve as an effective deterrent. However, societies where execution is carried out swiftly, such as Saudi Arabia, have found the death penalty to be extremely effective. The deterrent capabilities of capital punishment are also illustrated historically by social changes that occurred in Elizabethan England when hanging was discontinued as a punishment for a host of crimes, including pickpocketing, due to humanitarian agitation. The almost immediate result was a huge rise in the rate of pickpocketing.

  But debates about the death penalty are so emotionally laden that they tend to serve as red herrings, distracting us from preventive solutions. The most effective way to fight violent crime in the short term is to focus upon habitually violent people when they are very young and not to get distracted by social theorizing that leads nowhere.

  Unfortunately, once again our tendency to empathize gets in the way. After Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden were apprehended, Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, said, “It makes me angry not so much at individual children that have done it as much as angry at a world in which such a thing can happen” (23).

  Kindhearted sentiment. Perhaps sincere, or maybe just an attempt by the gov to come across as warm and fuzzy.

  Either way, inane.

  The world didn’t fire 134 bullets at innocent children and teachers; two individuals did. And we’d better pay close attention to them and to others like them in order to learn what created them and how to handle them.

  Johnson and Golden’s tender age led to much discussion about the ultimate disposition of their fates. The notion of an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old locked up for life tugs at our heartstrings, and legions of experts exist who are willing to testify that such boys should not be held responsible for their acts because they are mentally ill, and that because of their youth they can be rehabilitated. But any doctors attempting to promulgate a defense based on diminished mental capacity for the type of calculated, well-planned violence accomplished by Golden and Johnson would be at best in error and at worst perjurers in the service of fat fees and prime-time exposure.

  In terms of the possibility of rehabilitation, no one can say for sure, but bear in mind that experts are notoriously poor predictors of future violence and that, given the risks, the most sensible criteria to use when determinin
g the fates of young cold-blooded killers should be facts on the ground: These prepubescent villains have committed crimes so premeditated, vicious, and evil that I feel they should preclude reentry into noncriminal society at any time. Unfortunately, Arkansas law provided only for the incarceration of Johnson and Golden until the age of twenty-one. When those boys get out, watch your back.

  Lock up the psychopaths for as long as possible, and the streets will be safer. Keep the psychopaths away from the rest of us as completely as possible, and quality of life will soar.

  The sad truth is that there are bad people.

  Forget all that situational-ethics gibberish about fine distinctions between good and evil, excuses about how we all sin from time to time, how there’s really no such thing as abnormal, merely variants along a subtle continuum. True, very few of us are saints. But that has nothing to do with serious crime. Or with psychopaths.

  Bad people are really different.

  IV

  The Nature of the Beast

  A major clarification: i’m talking about psychopaths, not psychotics.

  These two terms are often erroneously used interchangeably by the popular press as well as by those who should know better, but other than beginning with psych- they have virtually nothing in common. In fact, in some sense they are polar opposites.

  Psychotics suffer from serious mental disorders of thought and emotion, probably biologically caused. The most common psychoses are the schizophrenias, a group of diseases, sometimes acute but more often chronic, featuring disintegration—not splitting—of personality. Schizophrenics represent between 1 and 4 percent of the population in virtually every society studied and suffer from confused and grossly distorted thoughts (delusions) and perceptions (hallucinations), extreme reliance upon internal stimulation (withdrawal and autism), impoverished thinking and language, and, more often than not, extremely high levels of anxiety and/or depression.

  Contrary to the nonsensical theories of authors such as British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who attained prominence during the 1960s with the notion that schizophrenia is glamorous, artistic, and poetic, madmen live in a dark, jumbled world of pain and torment. This is true mental illness.

  The claim that schizophrenics are less violent than normal people has been bandied about, but the data indicate otherwise: Madmen do exhibit a higher rate of homicide than the rest of us, most frequently when their delusions direct them to harm someone (24). The worst-case example of schizophrenic violence is the aforementioned disorganized serial killer.

  There is also a small subsample of murderous adolescents whose crimes appear to result from psychosis (25). These youngsters exhibit the same symptoms as do adult psychotic murderers—paranoia, command hallucinations (voices telling them to kill), and delusions (distorted thoughts, often about their victims). But the overall incidence of schizophrenic crime, especially child schizophrenic crime, remains low. Furthermore, the felonies of the mad, though often devastating, tend to be impulsive, nonrepetitive, and easily detected. Rusty Weston’s 1998 Capitol shooting, resulting in the murder of two guards, was an example of an inadequately treated schizophrenic wreaking tragedy. But schizophrenics do not prey habitually on society, nor do they contribute significantly to our crime rate.

  The same is true of those individuals suffering from the other primary psychotic classification, manic-depression—a disorder of affect (mood) in which emotions swing between severe depression and mental hyperactivity. Manic-depression is almost certainly biologically based. In addition to featuring dramatically increased rates of behavior, the manic phase may also involve some behaviors that resemble psychopathy, such as inflated self-esteem and excessive involvement in illogical and quixotic activities.

  In her brilliant book An Unquiet Mind, noted psychologist and mood researcher Kay Redfield Jamison describes one of her own manic episodes, during which she marched to the pharmacy and purchased dozens of earthquake survival kits. Manic individuals may also get involved in foolish financial schemes, both as perpetrators and as victims, and their mood shifts can be so severe that their grasp of reality is impaired, leading to a variant of what Jamison unsparingly terms “madness” (26).

  There is a slightly increased risk of violence among some manic-depressives, particularly during untreated manic phases, but once again, mania does not account for a high proportion of habitual criminality. And manic-depression is one of the mental illnesses for which there is consistently effective treatment.

  Most manic-depressives and at least a third of schizophrenics can be managed very well using medication and backup psychotherapy. Another third of schizophrenics respond partially but may continue to require institutionalization. The remaining third are resistant to treatment.

  To sum up, psychotics are the people we think of as crazy. Untreated or incompletely treated psychotics may explode one day and do something terrible, but they are generally too disordered to plan, plot, or calculate repetitive felonies and too cognitively fragmented to achieve any kind of stable career, including that of habitual crime.

  Look to the psychopaths for that kind of thing.

  V

  Evil as an Affliction?

  Psychopathy is something quite different from madness. Classified by psychiatrists and psychologists as a disorder of character or personality, psychopathy involves no loss of reason nor any increase in depression, agitation, and anxiety. On the contrary, psychopaths are lucid and free of angst, inner doubt, insecurities, or neurotic torment.

  Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden were described as unruffled when apprehended. (Later, though, when locked up, they cried for their mothers. The charitable interpretation of this emotional display was that the boys had suddenly gotten in touch with the enormity of the evil they’d caused. A more cynical though perhaps more reasonable spin is simply self-pity.) This remote coolness was also shown by Kipland Kinkel and is common in many killers, young or otherwise. It is also characteristic of psychopathic criminals in general.

  How many times have we heard the postoutrage cry of astonishment from neighbors and casual acquaintances: “He was always so quiet. Didn’t seem upset at all”? No surprise there. Psychopaths often appear to be preternaturally calm (more on this later).

  Psychopathy baffles psychiatrists and psychologists, and as stymied experts so frequently do, they have responded by relabeling. And because we’re talking about the fractious world of mental health, where pseudo-religious dogma and economic motives often masquerade as science, the labeling process has also been impacted by politics.

  Consider the linguistic shift that occurred during the late sixties and early seventies, when psychopathy, with its implication of disease and individual irregu-larity, proved a poor ideological fit with then-reigning, Marxist-derived social science norms that cast crime as a consequence of economic and social oppression. (Remember “All black men are political prisoners”?)

  According to Marxist and neo-Marxist criminological doctrine, society was sick and oppressive, while deviant individuals, even violent offenders, were poets, urban guerrillas, and freedom fighters—Promethean heroes struggling against institutional fascism. Today this malicious apologia is clung to most enthusiastically by the far right: Blow up hundreds of people in the Oklahoma City Federal Building and you’re a latter-day Tom Paine. But back in the late sixties and early seventies, social liberalism had its way with the criminal justice system. Prison sentences were radically shortened, the back wards of mental hospitals were unlatched, and efforts were made to integrate career criminals and the severely mentally ill into society, with disastrous results on both fronts. Alcoholism and drug abuse, common in both criminals and psychiatric patients, soared during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, as did crime rates. Social reformers were baffled by the “sudden” appearance of a “homeless problem.”

  Societal frustration finally led to outcries for more punishment and less counseling, but some of the old naÏveté remains. Recently I heard an “expert
” bemoan the fact that so much money was being spent on prisons instead of schools. As if the two were mutually exclusive. As if schooling psychopaths will turn them into model citizens.

  The social theorists of the sixties and seventies mugged language as well. “Riots” were upgraded to “insurrections,” “terrorists” to “freedom fighters.” (This playing fast and loose with the language endures to this day in the world press. It all depends, of course, upon whose ox is being gored. When the PLO blew up school buses in Israel, they were termed guerrillas and freedom fighters by American journalists. The Islamic extremists who blew up American embassies in the Middle East and East Africa were quickly excoriated as terrorists by the same correspondents.)

  During the sixties and seventies, psychopaths were refashioned as sociopaths. No longer ill, they were now judged to be victims of persecution.

  Not that this had any salubrious effect upon rates of robbery, rape, and murder. On the contrary, deemphasizing personal responsibility allowed for the continuation of social policies, such as alternative sentencing, early release, and mainstreaming of dangerous criminals into our neighborhoods, that boosted crime statistics.

  So a decade later, when advances in molecular structure and genetics caused a rush to biologize human behavior, the time was ripe for yet another episode of the Rename Game. This belief that every type of behavior has an underlying, traceable biological cause stemmed from an academically generated and media-fed campaign based on tantalizing but very sketchy data. Because journalists tend to be scientifically unsophisticated and eager for print space, they often serve as gullible conduits for the unsubstantiated claims of supposed sages in white coats.