Killer as "product of society" - how can this possibly make sense?

Great Debates
1

I often hear of killers - or other criminals - referred to as “products” of society. The basic idea I get is that various negative social forces shape certain individuals in such a way that they’re drawn to kill other people or commit other serious crimes. So it’s really our terrible society that is at fault, not the killer.

Now, I’m not one of those “responsibility” freaks that believes that nobody is ever driven insane by other people (nobody who believes this has ever had coworkers). But killing? Stealing? Give me a break.

I think it is pretty obvious that most people who commit serious crimes have a strong genetic predisposition to commit serious crimes. After all, most people are exposed to the same sorts of things that most killers are, but don’t commit those crimes. I have played tons of violent video games. Tons of them. I have been exposed to the satanic images in Dungeons and Dragons. I watched Die Hard a few times before I was ten. My family is lower middle-class. My parents got divorced when I was ten. I went to a high school where I was teased and told that I was gay many times. Many of my fellow students made statements suggesting that they might resort to violence themselves.

Yet I have never been in a physical confrontation with anyone. Anytime. Ever. Many of my friends have been into twisted sexual ideas, but I am not even remotely turned on by the idea of rape or other types of sexual aggression.

I admit that many killers had worse experiences during their childhood than I did during mine, but I just find it far-fetched that even sexual abuse would drive somebody to, say, round up women and massacre them.

I admit that my argument is mostly based on personal experience and armchair reasoning, but…why does anybody buy into the criminal-as-product-of-society idea?

2

Clearly criminal behavior is at least partially socially determined. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t see the vast differences in criminal behaviors from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, country to country, and culture to culture.

But I’m guessing you don’t really doubt that part. Whether its parenting or economic circumstance, pretty much all sides agree that social forces matter.

The step I would guess that you deny is that individuals culpability should be diminished by harsh social circumstances. That’s more of a philosophical debate than an empirical one. And I’m not even sure that’s actually what the criminal-as-product people are arguing. I see the criminal-as-product narrative primarily saying that instead of reforming only individuals who make bad choices using harsh application of the correctional system, we ought also to be reforming the social institutions that shape the choices faced by those individuals.

3

All that shows is that it’s not video games, D&D, or violent movies that are the problem. But that has no bearing whatsoever on, say, the effect of seeing one’s older brothers killed in gang disputes.

4

I’m not denying that one’s experiences affect one’s likelihood of committing violent crimes. I’m arguing that the “killer as product of society” idea tends to put all the eggs in the “nurture” basket and none in the “nature” basket. I certainly think that it is possible for societies to modulate the average experiences of its members to reduce crime levels, but that doesn’t mean that people who end up committing crimes were just as likely to commit them as anybody else within the same society. If you showed Ted Bundy the same images that I had seen throughout my life, he would have had quite different reactions.

I agree with Richard Parker that this is mostly an issue of responsibility, and hence one of morality. However, the moral claims people make against personal responsibility on the part of criminals often hinge on a total denial of one cause of crime (human nature). If it were accepted that people (mostly men) have natural tendencies to act violently and that different people have different levels of these tendencies, societies might be able to think more constructively about how to change the “nurture” part of the picture for the better and, in doing so, reduce crime rates.

5

So to sum up, there’s evidence that there’s at least some contribution from the environment, but no evidence for a hereditary component, and therefore you conclude that there must be a hereditary component?

6

Personality is partially determined by heredity. I’m saying that different personalities are differently disposed to violent crime and that heredity therefore plays a role in determining one’s likelihood of committing such crimes.

7

It’s both nature and nurture. But even some of the biological aspects have a societal component, for example people whose mothers used drugs during pregnancy may be more prone to criminality, and young children who are not given proper nurturing (emotionally and physically) can develop brain damage.

Everyone is a product of society, not just criminals. We all would have turned out different if we’d been socialized differently.

8

My understanding that as far as genetics go, the biggest possible contributor to criminal activity is impulse control, which has a relatively large nature-component.

I’m skeptical, though, that that’s anywhere near the biggest component to crime. Which isn’t to say violent video games make people rape and murder. If I had to guess at anything, it’d be the lack of having a strong, positive father figure for sons to emulate that’s the biggest factor.

9

There is no need to play lawyer Chronos. This is a very complicated topic that has thousands of scientific articles and many textbooks written on it. It is impossible to sort it all out in a Great Debates thread because no one knows the answer. We do know that a great deal of personality is nature and not nurture and that you can’t just take an average child and expose them to any sort of nurture and expect them to turn out to be a serial killer. However, you can easily raise kids in an environment that will make them more likely to turn out to be drug dealers, prostitutes, or gang members.

The overall question is way to large to answer even if anyone did have all the information.

10

I think part of the problem is a propensity to lump “criminal behaviour” into one basket. People are criminals for a huge range of reasons, and just linking criminality to one path gets you nowhere.

The question was about murderers. There are many reasons people murder. Sadly the largest number murder people they either know or are related to. The single most dangerous thing you can do is have a heated argument with your spouse in the kitchen. Especially if it involves money or fidelity. But would you call the murderer a “criminal” in the wider, non-legal meaning?

The usual path of logic to blame some element of society for criminal murders is one where someone falls between the cracks. Somene who turns to violent crime because they are desperate and have nothing left to lose anyway. Such an idea does not include psychopaths, serial killers, and things like murdering Uncle Bill to get the inheritance. Nor would it include gangland and organised crime killings. That pretty much gets you into a lovely moral quandry. Because it posits an ordinary person, with no dark past or abusive upbringing that turns to serious crime. The force being only the forces society as whole places on them. So, things like chronic unemployment, homelessness. There is no doubt that there are failinbgs in most western societies that people can fall between the support cracks, and for no great fault of their own, lose their job, house, family, and once down, it becomes very hard to claw back again. If you don’t have anywhere to live, a job is pretty hard to come by, no income makes any sort of accomodation very hard, add to that th health problems that will inevitably acrue and you have a pretty hard life. Yet, 99.9% of people who find themselves in such an invidious position do not resort to serious crime. I can’t imane that any of them don’t resort to some level of petty crime. When it it all that stands between you and the first meal for the day a quick snatch and grab is probably pretty appealing. But murder? Criminal assult? There is a breakdown beyond just circumstance here. Pretty muc a breakdown of identity. A dehumanisation, whereby other humans cease to be regarded as such, and something detached. In a curious sense a reversal of the dehumanisation that some societies have inflicted on oppressed minorities.

Bah, anyway, a stream of consciousness rant for the end of the day. :smiley:

11

“Play lawyer”? I saw his point as Socratic. The OP presented an unsubstantiated claim based on a contradiction of the evidence he or she presented and Chronos sought clarification. If the The Bith Shuffle wants to believe that genetics comprise a significant component to criminality, then it would be nice to see better evidence than merely that which refutes his or her point.

Even the physical origins proposed, so far, do not seem particularly genetic; maternal drug use and low birth weight are congenital problems, not genetic ones. Impulse control, for which no one has yet posted a source or a reference, is the only genetic component that has even made it into the thread, yet. I see Chronos’s post as a call on the OP to take the time to think through the issue and come back with somethng to support the position.

12

Bad example, since the likelihood of maternal drug abuse has a genetic component as well (cite, cite, cite). So not only will a baby be affected by his mother’s (partially genetically-related) drug abuse, but is more likely to inherit the bad genes that led to the abuse.

Low birthweight is correlated with multiple births (cite), and fraternal twinning runs in families (cite), so that has a genetic component as well.

Regards,
Shodan

13

Ugh. You are missusing the term correlated. A multiple birth may be a cause of low birth weight, but it is not reasonable to conclude that a person that had a low birth weight was a multiple birth. There are a huge number of causes of low birth weight. Singling out one that has a slight (two step) familial link is drawing a very long bow.

If you dig deep enough you can find a series of links that tie almost any two things together. But whether the link has any useful impact on reality is another matter.

Crunch the numbers. 6% of normal (non-multiple births are underweight) where as 50% of multiple are. But multiple births account for 3% of live births. So only one quarter of underweight births are associated with multiple births.

Then we see that a mother who is herself a fraternal twin is 2.5 times as likely to have fraternal twins. Now fraternal twins account for 1.7% of live births. The chance that a fraternal twin’s mother was also a fraternal twin is 4.25%. So the chance of an underweight birth being both associated with a multiple birth and a famlial link to fraternal twins is about one in 100. The other 99 underweight births come from other factors. (This is rough and ready stuff, I’m making a point, not doing the full expansion of the probabilities.)

14

I don’t buy into the “product of society” thing at all. However, after years and years of reading true crime, I have come to realize that there are three common threads found in the background of an overwhelming number of hard core criminals.

1.) they came from a very dysfunctional family where the mother has weird practices and enforces weird rules - i.e. insisting on bathing her 10 year old son,

2.) there is always some history of fundamentalist Christianity - usually, but not always a warped practice of it that contradicts the behavior going on in the household and

3.) the subject has had a severe head injury in childhood.

Being a big believer in personal responsibility and choosing to rise above one’s upbringing, I often struggle with the above in regards to how responsible the criminal actually is. The older I get and the more I read, the less I find myself with the unsympathetic attitude of “tough, there are a million stories of terrible upbringings (minus the head injury) just like yours, get over it and take responsibility for your own actions.” And, of course, the head injury statistics give me even more sympathy.

But no, I don’t believe “society” causes anyone to become a criminal. If that were the case, we’d have most of our children becoming criminals because, IMO, society is very depraved.

15

To be blunt, I think you are far, far, far from accurate in your observations.

16

How so?

As I said, my only “experience” is years of reading/studying criminals. While I’m certainly no psychiatrist, I can not deny what I have read and, as I said, those 3 common threads are the rule, not the exception.

17

Are you reading true crime books? Or are you reading academic studies?

18

If there were any real genetic component to criminal behaviour, Australia should have the highest crime rates of any country. Last I checked it did not.

19

Define killer. Much of the killings in the US are due to street gang activity, and that is socially created. Or are you talking about spree and serial killers?

If you take a young person, give them physical characteristics and a neighborhood that make them feel locked out of the more peaceful, wealthier society at large and tell them the only way to obtain money, attract women or live with dignity is to use violence against people, you are going to have far higher rates of violence.

Young black males age 17-29 make up about 1% of the nation’s population, but make up nearly 20-25% of all murder victims and offenders.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20203888/

Very few 70 year old white women are murdered each year.

Despite all of this the majority of people who grow up in ghettos and have been abused still grow up and do not commit serious violent felonies.

There are tons of factors that go into who becomes a murderer and who doesn’t. Age, economics, environment, race, abuse, genetics, nutrition, etc. just to name a few.

This book attempts to understand how rational self interest from an evolutionary point of view (obtaining status or power) can contribute to homicides.

Mutations in the DRD2 gene can also make a person more violent. It codes for a protein that removes catecholamines from the synapse after it has been fired. people who have been abused in childhood and have the genetic mutation tend to have a harder time removing the catecholamines, making them more impulsive and violent.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/15/content_8547387.htm
“I don’t want to say it is a crime gene, but 1 percent of people have it and scored very high in violence and delinquency,” Guo said in a telephone interview with media.

http://college.unc.edu/features/july2008/article.2008-07-17.8695085961

At the same time, daily meal time with parents can negate some of the effects of having the DRD2 gene.

20

It is widely (although not universally) held on this board that everything that anyone does is determined; that there is no “you” in the causal sense to cause ANY of your behavior, that there is no free will (for anyone, not just murderers, in case that’s not obvious). Specifically attributing it to society is a specific form of determinism: social determinism. It pays more attention to ideas and concepts and attitudes, rather than deriving its determinism from physics and a more general cause/effect theory, but it amounts to the same thing.

My opinion is that the overwhelming majority of what is in your head (and mine) is not our own thoughts, but that at least a small bit is. I do not believe punishment works in any effective sense. But insofar as we rely on law, we should do it consistently: if everyone is held accountable for their actions in other venues (contract law, etc), it makes no sense to carve an exception for criminals who commit serous crimes. It does, however, make sense to acknowledge that environments breed behaviors and that if we want to eliminate the behaviors we need to change the environments. (with the participatory consent of those IN the environments, btw; powerlessness is part of the problem).