I worked with a guy whose nephew killed a cop and is currently serving life without parole in Angola (in Angola, life REALLY does mean life!).
My former best friend of eighteen years killed four people before he hit ten years of age. Three were gang-related (he fell in with the wrong crowd very early in life), but the other was an innocent victim, a classmate who provoked him merely by stealing his lunch box (or an apple from said lunch box - I forget which). He pounded mercilessly upon the kid until he stopped moving, then, realizing what he had done, became not only afraid of the consequences, but also disgusted with himself. He ran away. Nobody ever suspected him.
He never really regretted killing the gang-banging heroin dealers, but will carry the guilt of the innocent kid’s murder to his grave.
He was never arrested for any of these crimes, but, since he was so young when they were committed, he’d have been long since released by now even if he had been convicted of them.
All of that happened before I met him, and, while he may still be a relatively aggressive individual nearly twenty years later, it pales in comparison to his youthful exploits.
I also once had a schizophrenic friend who sold large quantities of drugs. A Mexican man in search of a cheap score approached him with a knife in a cheap Texas motel room. My friend blew his head off with a Glock and ran away with the dope he’d bought - or so he told me. Schizophrenics aren’t exactly the most truthful people on Earth. Last I heard, he was living on disability somewhere in California.
I have no idea how I befriend these types; the last time I threw a punch in anger was in eighth grade (and I ended up with a concussion and bloody nose on the middle school floor).
Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a sociopath?
Not all killers are sociopaths and not all sociopaths are killers. Some are Fortune 500 CEOs who have never committed an act of violence in their entire lives. They may be self-centered and anti-social, but they force themselves to (relatively) conform to society’s norms and channel their emotions in non-violent ways.
DocCathode, but I thought I remember reading that 80% of those in jails could have ADD…and I remember reading The Broken Cord, on Fetal Alochol syndrome, and it said that a lot of FAS kids end up in jail b/c of their ADD issues.
This wasn’t addressed to me, but I’d like to take a stab at answering it.
The answer is, “Maybe, but not usually.” You’re talking about an entire re-build of someone’s entire personality. And one of the most immutable facts of life is that you can’t change someone who doesn’t WANT to change.
If the desire is there, intensive therapy might do it, but most criminals will never get it. The prison system is far, far too overburdened to provide anything but the most cursory of psychiatric care. Most of them don’t come from money, so the chances of them being able to afford the necessary treatment once they’re released from prison are slim indeed.
Yeah, there are probably some who have some sort of an epiphany and go through a quiet internal struggle to acquire empathy, but most don’t want it. Who would really want to face up to doing something awful? Once you got that empathy, it would come with a nice heaping side dish of guilt and subconciously, that may be a lot of the reason why those who have vague shreds of empathy within them turn it off.
I will say that not all prisoners are sociopaths. Some are people who just got in over their head and found themselves breaking the law because of desperate straits. Some are people who lost control in a moment of weakness.
But the hard-core criminals - the ones who wake up in the morning and decide to hold up a liquor store and shoot all the witnesses in order to steal three hundred dollars - they’re sociopaths. Other factors like lack of education, an inability to make long-term plans, ADD, family history, etc may determine the nature of their crimes and the chances of they’re getting caught and convicted - but it’s the lack of empathy that makes them criminals.
I worked with a guy named Dave who did time for murder and lived through the New Mexico prison riot.
Dave killed a guy when he was 18. Daves story was that this particular individual had picked on him since grade school. Dave was short, about 5’4, and said that he had been picked on all his life by the same group of guys. He lived in a small New Mexico town so it is easy to believe that he was always around the same people. Anyway, one day at school this guy started picking on Dave during auto shop. Dave got pissed and swung at the guy. Dave had a wrench in his hand at the time and killed the guy. Dave got convicted of murder.
When they hired Dave I was rather upset about it, I was the assistant manager and didn’t like the idea of having to boss around a murderer. Turns out I was wrong. Dave was totally trustworthy, give him a job and you knew it would get done. After I figured out that Dave wasn’t likely to suddenly start trying to kill me I started talking to him. He truely regreted killing the kid. He told me about the killing, his time in prison, about the riot (he saw a some people hold down another inmate and BLOWTORCH his head), about his treatment inside (he was a small guy and got used/beaten a lot) and how he started working on anger management. He also told me that he could barely read.
I got Dave into a reading program for adults and helped him out with it when I could. Dave wanted to improve himself and took it seriously. He didn’t want to go back and stayed far away from anything that would get him in trouble.
I moved to a different store and don’t know what happened to him after that. My bet would be that he actually followed through on stuff, like getting a high school diploma. He did his time and appeared to really regret what happened, not just to him but to the kid he killed and the kids family.
I grew up around lots of criminals. My biological father is a career criminal. My mother served prison time for money laundering. My brother and all of his friends are ex/current junkies.
I don’t remember much glamorous about any of it. I never got to live in penthouses with bowls of cocaine and Michelle Pfeiffer in a white dress. No sleek cars or snazzy clothes. Just druggies, my raving junkie/schizophrenic brother, and my mother, who has an amazing talent for making the worst possible decision in any given situation. My mom likes to brag about all the money she was pulling in, but I never saw any of it – she never did anything smart with it, even if she DID make as much as she claims, which I doubt. She was arrested and imprisoned when I was a teen and I got bounced around between a couple of relatives. It’s pretty embarassing now that I’m older and wiser to be able to step back and see my family for the low-class, ignorant, drugged-up rednecks they were (and are to a lesser extent today).
I do wonder about my biological father – there is strong evidence of some sort of hereditary insanity on his side of the family. There’s too many suicides, filicide with subsequent suicide, stints in the state hospital for the insane, etc. for a pattern NOT to emerge.
I never got the whole story. It was hush-hush in our family, but what I gathered was that one of my cousins who I used to hang around with at family dinners and Thanksgiving and such, joined the Hell’s Angels after his mother moved with her kids to California. I don’t know exactly what. if any, crimes he committed, but he was found murdered and cut into several pieces and scattered along the Pacific Coast Highway. He must have done something to piss somebody off pretty bad.
However, I also worked at an inner-city school for adults in LA, and had lots of ex-cons in class. They were all trying to make a better life, and most of them did great at the school and actually found some decent jobs when they graduated. Most had gotten involved with gangs when they were young, and realized too late how stupid it was.
One bit of trivia I learned: the Latino gangs (in LA at least) gave their members an option to leave the gang if they got a girl pregnant…they could leave the gang without any strings attached and go be a regular, working father and husband. But it was a one-time offer - if they declined, they were in the gang forever and leaving the gang was no longer an option. I was told that the black gangs didn’t have an option to leave the gang and once you were a member, it was for life. Don’t know how true this is today, but that is what some of my students told me privately back in the late 80’s.
Grandpa Bodoni and a couple of his older sons (my father is the youngest or second youngest son) were in the Mafia during Prohibition. They were liquor smugglers, but went back to commercial fishing after Prohibition was repealed.
My two (younger) brothers are both life long criminals. Brother A is much more the “hard core” criminal, crimes of violence etc, never held down a job, made his living through crime, or on the fringes of it, since he was 14. Brother B much more narcissistic and thinks crime makes him smarter than any one else, because he sees it as the easy way and all us suckers who wait in line just don’t get it.
Both of them are very charismatic.
Brother A is also possibly the most incompetent criminal I have ever known - he as pulled some spectacularly stupid stunts, both in their woefully poor thinking through and in their being waaaaaaay too ambitious for someone of his somewhat less than stellar IQ to attempt. He would always come out of jail with some plan he picked up from a bloke inside. And we’d say to him “Mate, if this guy is such a great planner, how come he’s… inside?”
Needless to say they have never and hopefully will never be any where near my children.
I had a guy who worked for me in the mid 80’s., I’ll call him Joe. He was in his late 20’s at the time. A good worker, but very quiet. We would travel together and it was almost impossible to get him in a conversation. I did learn a few things after awhile. He had grown up in East L.A. and had been in a gang. He moved to the PNW in his early 20’s to get away from the gang life.
I found out he had been arrested for homicide around 89 or 90, and subsequently sent to Walla Walla. He called me once or twice, while awaiting trial, to talk. Apparently he wasn’t close to anyone except his GF and she was responsible for his arrest. Later, when he first got to Walla Walla he wrote me a couple of times, he was optimistic at that time, said he was going to church meetings and was on a list to attend college classes.
Here’s the gist of the story he told me. I think it’s fairly accurate, but I’m sure he slanted it to make himself look better.
When he first came up here, he brought his younger brother up, to get him away from the bad neighborhood, he told me his brother was mildly retarded, although I never met him. After awhile the brother got into drugs and Joe had a hard time keeping the kid straight. One night a drug dealer came to Joe’s house w/ his brother. The dealer and Joe got into an argument, there was a gun involved, and the dealer ended up dead. Joe figured, with his L.A. background, that the police wouldn’t believe self defense, although that was the way he saw it. So he took the body to a remote area and buried it. He threw the gun away too. Later, after he’d been w/ his GF for a couple of years, he told her the whole story, including where the gun and body were. Sometime later they had a falling out and she ended up going to the police and telling them the story. They found the body and the gun and charged him w/ manslaughter. Ironically, the police persuaded him to plead to the manslaughter charge by threatening to charge his GF. They wouldn’t buy his self defense story, although I believe that they would have had a hard time convicting him, if he could have afforded an attorney. He did about 7 years and he came to see me when he was released. He was a changed man, and not for the better. I discouaged the friendship and I haven’t seen, nor heard about, him for several years. Prison certainly didn’t do him any good. I once saw a kid who was trying to change his life and after prison, I saw a hardcase who had learned only to look out for himself first.
While there are some who will never be anything but trouble, they are a small minority. If our criminal justice system and our schools could identify and help young people, before they get in too deep, we would be better off as a society and would have to spend money warehousing many of these people in places where they only learn how worthless they are and that they must look out for themselves, because there is no help, or hope. I think it would be cheaper and it would certainly be better for everyone if we spent money rehabilitating people instead of locking them up and forgeting about them.
No, I’m not a bleeding heart, but I am practical. There is more than one way to make people accept responsibility for anti social behavior.
I know someone who is a big time druggie. He has been in prison twice, lost numerous jobs, is barred from his relative houses for stealing (one of his cousins refused to let him help her move because “I’d have a lot less to unpack.”) He has been in prison twice for drug charges, and still doesn’t see anything wrong with doing and dealing cocaine.
Grew up with him in Jax, FL. He was in my Sunday School class (no - really). Went to kindergarten, elementary & part of junior high with him. He was always a very cruel boy. He went to prison when we were in junior high for killing a man & burning his body in a car (the man allegedly sexually assaulted him). He’s now on death row for another murder; I found out in 1999 when doing research for alumni for a HS class reunion.
And that’s part of the reason I’m no longer a cop. I found myself developing the “us-vs-them” mentality. I realize it’s a survival mechanism, but it wasn’t one I wanted for myself.
How did you prevent inmates from gleaning personal information about yourself - address, phone number, family, etc.? I should imagine all prison employees worry about this, even a little bit.
The consequences are too obvious to require explanation.
I can answer partially for DAs and cops in some jurisdictions- if you look up their license plate, for example, on the DMV website (the one the public isn’t supposed to have access to), it will not list their personal info. It will usually list their department HQ as the address & phone number.
