Depths of Depravity 9

This post is one of a series about the book The Anatomy of Evil by Dr Michael Stone. It is recommended that these posts be read in order. Unless otherwise noted all quotes used are from the book The Anatomy of Evil.

I wanted to include a few other ideas from doctor Stone before I close out this topic. He wrote a few more things that I feel have a lot of bearing on the topic of evil.

Stone described the work of Adrian Raine. Raine has studied antisocial and psychopathic personalities and criminality for over fifteen years. He and his colleagues have had several papers published on the topic. 

Among other discoveries in his extensive research he found evidence that the category of killers who carefully plan has a lower resting heart rate than other people. We know that many of us could imagine being hot blooded and if our spouse or child was threatened, harmed or humiliated responding by losing our tempers.

This information is not about people who experience a wide range of emotions, including compassion and empathy and regret for hurting others. This is about the people we consider cold blooded, acting with considerable time to restrain violent impulses and having no better nature to appeal to or good sense to come to, in this case meaning basic human decency.

Some men, according to Raine, have a low resting heart rate, an inadequate response to fear, a lack of conscience, and poor decision-making skills. Stone described these as features that are characteristic of antisocial men and even more so in psychopathic men.

Stone described this as an inherited trait and that the callous and unemotional children who display this are often the psychopaths of tomorrow.

Stone recommended that children with these and aggressive traits be raised in a stable and living home. Probably a good recommendation for all children, but unfortunately many of us instead of getting a smooth road and trip on easy street get a very uneven journey on a road of jagged stones, as Stone remarked in one case. 

Regarding the "Bad Seed" scenario - a person who has no abuse or neglect as a child, is all treated and never traumatized by caregivers or peers or anyone who yet turns out to commit monstrous evil, to become a sociopath or psychopath or human predator in the extreme - Stone considers such cases extremely rare, but not impossible.

So, a serial killer or murderer could really never have been mistreated by their parents or anyone. This is especially relevant if you know a killer, as I do, and wonder if they must have been manufactured by monsters. In rare cases their parents and others around them may be genuinely not responsible for the outcome.

Most of us also know lesser evils and likewise, a good family can, despite their best efforts, produce a bad human being.The

Stone pointed out that the Bad Seed may blind us to the many, many people who endure prolonged parental torture, abuse of every kind imaginable, who he sees emerging as adults who greatly benefit society. He sees good genetic traits as helping them. Stone described their overcoming the abuse they endured as miraculously transcending horrors. He calls them the Good Seed.

Now, I can't say it can be entirely accounted for just with genetic and environmental factors. There might be other factors. I can't rule it out.

I have to say this is relevant to me personally after twenty-five years in Scientology and frankly in my seventeen years before that I think if Stone knew the story, he would probably say that I was dealt the losing hand and I am not alone.

Similar in their circumstances are the people raised in cults, the further in the cult that their parents and caregivers were, the worse it often is for children. The children who, for example, had both parents in the Sea Org years ago who were nearly completely abandoned and left to be raised by Sea Org nannies or in Scientology schools were dealt a particularly bad regarding neglect quite often and also regarding severe abuse, even including physical and sexual abuse in some cases. 

Stone pointed out something that I have seen evidence supporting in several studies done in different countries over the years. He remarked on the fact that there is a "life-course persistent" antisocial type known that is about 5 percent of men who commit between 50 to 70 percent of crimes.

Regarding crime, in particular violent crime there are some interesting quotes available:

"Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, said by email: "A routine finding in the criminological literature is that about half of the crime is committed by a very small fraction of the population, around 5-8 percent depending on the sample and methodology used. This finding has been replicated in many different studies around the world. The bottom line is that a small fraction of the offending population is responsible for a great majority of crime." Piquero said most of the studies tracked residents only into late adolescence or early adulthood." W. Gardner Selby Politifact

 "The Philadelphia studies and others

Since the 1960s, researchers have probed how often youths come into police contact, consistently finding that a subset of people account for around half of the crimes reported to police.

In the seminal "Crime in a Birth Cohort" and a followup study, a team led by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang tracked nearly 10,000 boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia from age 10 through 17; they ultimately gauged how often each boy came in contact with police for an offense. One upshot: 627 boys, 6 percent of the group, each accounted for five or more offenses, according to police reports. Those boys, Wolfgang wrote, were collectively identified as responsible for 52 percent of all the offenses recorded in the study and, he said, about two-thirds of all violent crimes believed to have been committed by the juveniles. In Patrick-speak, Wolfgang found that 6 percent of juvenile boys accounted for about half of alleged juvenile crimes.

The follow-up study, presented in progress in 1982, tracked more than 28,000 boys and girls born in 1958 who lived in Philadelphia from age 10 through 17. Among males, the study found, 61 percent of reported  offenses  were committed by 1,030 "chronic recidivists," comprising 7 percent of males in the study. That is, 7 percent of the boys accounted for 61 percent of the juvenile offenses.

David Farrington, a University of Cambridge professor of psychological criminology reported in 2006 on criminal offenses by 411 South London boys occasionally interviewed by the team starting when the subjects were 8 years old in 1961. The researchers, who also checked criminal records, found that a "small proportion of the study males (7%) were defined as ‘chronic offenders’ because they accounted for about half of all officially recorded offenses" in the study. The most common offenses, they wrote, included thefts, burglaries and car thefts followed by violence, vandalism, fraud and drug abuse.

In 2014, Swedish researchers drawing on records accounting for the experiences of 2.5 million people born in that country from 1958 to 1980 reported that from 1973 to 2004, some 1 percent of the population accounted for 63 percent of all violent crime convictions. Researcher  Örjan Falk added: "Psychotic disorders are twice as common among repeat offenders as in the general population, but despite this fact they constitute a very small proportion of the repeat offenders." W. Gardner Selby Politifact

It is worth pointing out that Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door described how some predators are not violent and that depending on their impulses and personalities might never commit a violent act or crime. Some sociopaths she described as simply not caring for anyone other than themselves.

Stone echoed a sentiment shared by Jon Atack. He has proposed that we can get pro social sociopaths if we take children who Stone described as having psychopathic tendencies and we explain to them calmly the benefits for them if they cooperate with others and treat others decently. They both believe that the personal benefit of being pro social can lead to behavior that steers such children towards good habits.

It is plausible and worth serious research in my opinion but we sadly cannot expect this or any approach to have a guaranteed one hundred percent success rate. Stone pointed out that none of the risk factors give us a clear and predictable path towards evil.

In a way that is bad, because better understanding could avert suffering, but in a way it is good, because if we arrived at too high a certainty on future behavior we might unjustly incarcerate people who have never committed crimes or shown themselves to be a danger to themselves or anyone else, and that is another kind of injustice.

Stone remarked on how someone had written that naturally evil men are rare, the type who hunt and kill other humans for sport. But Stone added that the vast majority of people who do this were treated horribly as children. 

He expressed the point I have come to again and again that serial rapists and serial killers should not be eligible for release, saying the idea is out of the question. 

An important aspect of these people is that some had no compassion for anyone while others had a kind of splitting, reserving compassion for some people while completely denying it to their victims.

Stone pointed out that we can prevent a great deal of future suffering if we teach people about the effects of parental cruelty. It certainty can't hurt.

Stone again, emphasized the disastrous consequences of early release for serious offenders by pointing out that William Bonin, Ted Bundy, Gary Heidnick, Ed Kemper, Clifford Olson, Derrick Todd Lee, and Jack Unterweger all were convicted of serious sex crimes then prematurely released and went on to rape and murder at least 107 victims.

Just seven men did that after being convicted of a serious sex crime and being released far too easily. 

If you take just one thing away from this entire series on evil to seriously consider I hope it would be the idea that the criminal justice system is prone to releasing the worst of the absolute worst people - and to be clear we are talking about people who rape, who sexually abuse children, who murder and often have very clear signs in their behavior on top of their heinous crimes, to warn us to seriously consider never releasing them - and that this has tragic consequences far too often.

I want to be very clear, I am not looking for a three strikes law that doesn't distinguish the truly abhorrent, soul crushing, offenses of sex crimes, molestation of children and murder from crimes against property. I don't want to throw people in prison for marijuana possession, for example or to routinely ruin someone's life for shoplifting.

I want to focus on the specific categories of extreme violence and sexual crimes. 

If you take away another thing I want it to be that these truly monstrous human beings, human predators of the worst type are as Stone remarked mercifully rare, extremely rare. I have read that the FBI estimates that about fifty serial killers are active at any given time in America. If that sounds like a lot remember that there are over three hundred million people in America. So, that would give us six million people for each serial killer. Further, if we consider that only 5% or so of people commit between 50 - 70 percent of crimes this leaves most of us in different categories.

I think that perhaps 10% of the population is serious trouble, including human predators who either should be in prison or if they don't violate the law or have violent impulses work extremely hard to ruin others in other ways, perhaps rumors or smear campaigns. Telling the right lie at the right time can ruin a career, a marriage, a friendship, a family or a life. 

Some of these people specialize in telling half the story if it makes someone else look bad when the whole story would explain why they had to do something and would make them look good. You put something in an unusual place because a boss told you to or the usual place was painted. You didn't do something because you were not sure how to do it in an unusual situation. They leave out the part that explains why you didn't do the usual action. 

I think we probably have another 10% or so that are not usually as much trouble as the first 10% but still a lot of trouble. They are people we think of as jerks and assholes. They are out for themselves first and often most others are not valued highly by them. They may have some compassion but it is not always in full bloom, if they have it, and we consider them selfish, they may see themselves as fair and just but can treat others in ways they would never tolerate being treated.

After this we get into a huge section of people who are not the human predators and are a lot more complicated with both good and bad in them. 

If you get a third thing to consider out of this I hope it would be that the way we treat people, especially children and teens, has a tremendous influence on the way they turn out and the future. If we can provide decent and loving homes for children, including decent housing, education, safety from violence, and good nutrition it will pay off for us many times over in terms of reducing crime, improving the mental health of future generations and reversing the cycle of violence.