# Killer as "product of society" - how can this possibly make sense? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 11, 2009, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460 "2009-10-11T23:53:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![PrayerieGirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a88e4f/32.png) [@PrayerieGirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrayerieGirl)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/21 "2009-10-12T15:50:02Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > Are you reading true crime books? Or are you reading academic studies? Not acadamic studies, just books written about the criminal and the crimes. Everything from the cheesy one-night-read paperbacks to more in-depth, sophisticated books. As I said, I’m certainly no expert but based on years of reading about their lives and crimes, one thing that can not be denied is those 3 circumstances I listed are almost always present. That certainly can’t be a coincidence. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/22 "2009-10-12T16:14:46Z")
> [@PrayerieGirl](#): > > As I said, I’m certainly no expert but based on years of reading about their lives and crimes, one thing that can not be denied is those 3 circumstances I listed are almost always present. That certainly can’t be a coincidence. Perhaps they get written up more because they make better reading. What you have is anecdotal evidence, with selection bias by the people choosing which cases to write about. Yes, it’s based on your experience with the genre of true crime writing, but there’s no reason to believe that you can extrapolate that to real world statistics. In other words, not coincidence but not data either. ---
**Author:** ![PrayerieGirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a88e4f/32.png) [@PrayerieGirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrayerieGirl)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/23 "2009-10-12T16:18:41Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > Perhaps they get written up more because they make better reading. What you have is anecdotal evidence, with selection bias by the people choosing which cases to write about. Yes, it’s based on your experience with the genre of true crime writing, but there’s no reason to believe that you can extrapolate that to real world statistics. > > In other words, not coincidence but not data either. True, Telemark. I would agree with that. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/24 "2009-10-12T16:36:44Z")
When Clyde Barrow entered Eastham Prison, Texas in 1930 he was known as a petty burglar and a car thief. During his stay in prison Clyde was repeatedly raped by a convict named Big Ed. This was a dormitory style prison so the guards and the inmates were all aware of what Big Ed was up to (he did this with other prisoners as well). Big Ed is thought to be the first man Clyde Barrow ever killed and most of us are at least somewhat familiar with his career after his release from prison. I certainly wouldn’t absolve Barrow of his crimes on account his tough stint in prison. However, it appears as though the way American society in the 1930s treated their prisoners in Texas had a hand in creating the monster that Barrow became. Odesio ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/25 "2009-10-12T17:34:37Z")
The biggest predictor of criminality in my experience is peer pressure, far and away - mixing with the wrong types, getting into the wrong sort of activity, egging each other on - that’s how it starts. The impulse thing seems more related to thrill seeking, ‘getting a buzz’ which then becomes the norm over several years, lack of self control and immediate gratification, along with an inability to wait, innapropriate or over the top responses to varius situations all point to this. Other things that are common, but not necassarily indicative of criminality - poor education, poor empathy, sense of entitlement. Sure there are many non-criminals who also fall into these categories but they are law abiding, but almost all criminals I meet are within them. There are those who believe that poor education leads to crime, but I think they have it the wrong way around, most criminals took to crime at an early age and preferred it to school, so they miss out on their education, and once past a certain stage, they will never get it back - in other words crime caused the poor education. I would say, and various agencies and institutions concur, that criminals exhibit poor maturity, they have massive personality deficiencies, around 80% of them have one or more social disorders most of which are learned rather than inherited - being insitutionalised exarcebates this, and use of drugs only multiplies this up. Most of the creation of criminals is done by the criminals themselves, its too easy to blame society as a whole. We as a society can make conditions less favourable for crime, murder is a specific crime in some situations, however gang crime isn’t - it really is down to mixing with the wrong sort. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/26 "2009-10-12T17:41:09Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > 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. Good thing no one made that conclusion, then. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/27 "2009-10-12T18:06:41Z")
> [@Odesio](#): > > When Clyde Barrow entered Eastham Prison, Texas in 1930 he was known as a petty burglar and a car thief. During his stay in prison Clyde was repeatedly raped by a convict named Big Ed. This was a dormitory style prison so the guards and the inmates were all aware of what Big Ed was up to (he did this with other prisoners as well). Big Ed is thought to be the first man Clyde Barrow ever killed and most of us are at least somewhat familiar with his career after his release from prison. > > I certainly wouldn’t absolve Barrow of his crimes on account his tough stint in prison. However, it appears as though the way American society in the 1930s treated their prisoners in Texas had a hand in creating the monster that Barrow became. > Odesio Didn’t know that. The biography of Carl Panzram touches on that subject too, what role does punitive treatment and torture cause people to become more criminal. > **[Carl Panzram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Panzram)** > > Charles "Carl" Panzram (June 28, 1891 – September 5, 1930) was an American rapist, serial killer, and habitual offender. In prison confessions and in his autobiography, Panzram confessed to having murdered twenty-one boys and men, only five of which could be corroborated. He is suspected of having killed more than a hundred boys and men in the United States alone, and several more in Portuguese Angola. > Panzram also confessed to having committed more than a thousand acts of rape against males ... ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2009, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460/28 "2009-10-12T21:15:27Z")
I ranted about this very issue many pit threads ago: > [@](#): > > Somewhat similar is the situation where someone has been convicted of some horrible crime, like child abuse, and I might be heard to ask “I wonder if he had a troubled childhood?”. Does that mean that I think it’s an excuse? If it turns out that his kitty died, am I going to give him a big hug and say “oh, man, my liberal brother, I too had a kitty who died, how can I possibly blame you for raping a baby given the horrible things you had to deal with”? Of COURSE not. Regardless of what motivated it, he’s now a child raper, and he’s going to jail forever, and I personally will happily toss the key into the ocean. BUT, suppose we notice that out of 100 child rapers, 95 were raped themselves as children, or 85 had alcoholic fathers, or 65 had pet iguanas. Any information of that sort that we can come up with will help us figure out how best to spend our tax dollars to set up programs to prevent the current generation of children from growing up to be child rapers. Again, it’s not boo-hoo-liberal-weakness. It’s a desire to PREVENT CHILDREN FROM BEING MOLESTED!!! > > (Which doesn’t mean I feel no empathy at all… if someone was molested as a child and had an alcoholic father and now is a vicious criminal as an adult, basic human decency requires me to reflect on how sad it is that a formerly innocent child got destroyed and turned into an evil adult due to factors at least partially out of his control, and how can I say that I would have done better had I had the horrible misforture to be born into that situation. BUT, if he’s now an evil adult, he’s now an evil adult, and I’m not letting him out of jail just because he was unlucky in where he was born. I can conceivably see factors like that being used in an argument for life-in-prison vs. death penalty, but the poor guy’s troubled childhood shouldn’t matter at all if the question is whether he’ll ever be let free to potentially injure more victims). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killer-as-product-of-society-how-can-this-possibly-make-sense/513460.md?page=1)