The Criminal Mentality

Somewhere in the United States tonight, the chances are a young man is planning to kill several people. He would be in his early 20s, mild-mannered, polite and rather studious. He would likely be married but not satisfactorily. He might be attending college, though on a basis both accelerated and irregular. Once in recent years, he would have spent time in apparently aimless wandering; friends will recall later that, yes, now they remembered he once disappeared for a while. They will also remember that he was "the quiet type," didn't say much; and one, a neighbor who knew him when he was a child, will remember that he did odd things and that there was something vaguely "unhappy" or even "unhealthy" about his home life with his parents. But his mother will tell reporters he was a "perfect" son; his pastor will recall that he sang in the choir; and a grammar school teacher, that he was a "model student." A psychiatrist he visited voluntarily a few years ago will find in his records routine notes: "loveless childhood," "severe anxiety and tension," "low affect," "seems flat," "relates poorly to authority figures," "feels inadequate," "paranoid trends." The records (continued on page 249)Criminal Mentality(continued from page 165) will show that what appeared to precipiate his visit to the psychiatrist was trouble with his wife, and that the psychiatrist urged him to return next week at the same time--but he never did.

The people he is planning to kill tomorrow mean nothing to him. Chances are he doesn't even know them yet. But he knows dimly they will be women. Tonight he will stay up all night, making preparations. Tomorrow, after it is all over and he is being led away manacled from the bodies, surrounded by newspapermen and television photographers, he will smile and say, no, he isn't sorry he did it and, no, he had no particular reason to do it except that he wanted to become famous.

It would perhaps not be good public policy to pursue further this sketch of a mythical murderer. Several recent mass murderers have said they were "inspired" to horror by the publicity given a previous mass murderer. Psychiatrists know that such publicity can never be more than a trigger mechanism, releasing a homicidal drive already deep-set.

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In recent months, a Minnesota farmer shot and killed his wife and set a fire in which his four children burned to death; a 21-year-old high school dropout shot and killed a family of nine in Canada; a sniper high on the tower of the University of Texas in Austin killed 13 people and wounded 31; a man entered an apartment in Chicago and strangled eight student nurses; another man shot five people to death in New Haven, Connecticut; and still another invaded a beauty parlor in Mesa, Arizona, forced five women and two children to lie down on the floor and shot them methodically.

Such shocking, spectacular and seemingly senseless crimes make us wonder whether "a criminal mentality," or "killer instinct," exists and what can be done to protect ourselves from its work. This article explores those questions and related ones.

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It may be well to dispose at once of the notion that man is a peaceable animal, though this should hardly be necessary if one remembers Auschwitz. As Konrad Lorenz has shown, of all the carnivores, only two lack built-in inhibitions against killing members of their own species--rats and men.

All human societies distinguish between killing members of one's own group and killing outsiders. The latter is called "warfare"; the former, "murder." Since man does not feel inhibited against killing his own kind, he has enacted laws against it. We punish murder. Nonetheless, we feel fairly comfortable with murder for profit, or revenge, or jealousy, or some other "rational" motive that we can understand. What shocks us is a murder "without reason." What shocks and bewilders and frightens us most of all is mass murder "without reason."

Some mass murders are completely rational. In the 1890s, Dr. H. H. Holmes lured more than 20 ladies to his murder castle in Chicago, mulcted most of them, married some and dispatched all. People were shocked but not bewildered; greed they could understand. In 1948, two young men were paroled from the state "reformatory" in Ohio, embarked on a series of stick-ups, killed a tavern owner, remembered that a reformatory guard had treated them ill, went to seek him out, entered the home of his superior instead, took this man and his wife and daughter to a cornfield, shot them dead and, during the ensuing manhunt, killed two other people who happened to impede their flight. The state killed both, but with understanding: Robbery, revenge and flight are comprehensible.

But the emotions aroused by the Austin sniper or the Arizona beauty-parlor killer or the nurses' strangler are different. They differ even from the emotions aroused by Howard Unruh, who in 1949 slaughtered 13 people in Camden, New Jersey; for Unruh was psychotic--the diagnosis was schizophrenia--and people can accept the idea that lunatics kill. (Actually, they seldom do: They cannot often organize and direct their energies toward so sustained an undertaking as murder, especially mass murder.) What bothers people about the noninsane unmotivated murderer is that he simply cannot be explained. His activities do not yield to rational analysis. Spectacular inexplicable crime simply calls public attention to a fact that experts must confront every day: We simply do not know much about the roots of criminality.

Day in, day out, judges must assess criminal responsibility; wardens must keep, and may try to "rehabilitate," those adjudged dangerous to society; parole boards must decide when it is safe to loose a prisoner on society. These are sometimes life-and-death decisions. And they must involve the roots of crime. Yet knowledge and theory on this subject are a treacherous swamp.

Through this swamp flow three main streams of thought. One is the theory that criminality is biologically conditioned, or even inherited. An Italian physician, Cesare Lombroso, in 1876 postulated the born criminal. Lombroso said he had established by anthropological measurements that the physical and psychological characteristics of criminals differed strikingly from those of non-criminals. But soon a British study exploded them and, as psychoanalysis arose, Lombroso became almost a joke. In 1939, however, Earnest Hooton, an American anthropologist, after studying 15,000 criminals, published his view that criminals are biologically inferior to non-criminals. Dr. William H. Sheldon, after studying several hundred delinquent young men, concluded that there is a necessary relationship between body type--physique--and temperament; his work is an attempt to ground psychiatry in biology. He found three kinds of delinquents--people who get into trouble because of mental or medical insufficiency (e.g., feeble-mindedness), because of psychotic or neurotic difficulties or because of none of these and for no other apparent reason. This last, Sheldon termed the component of "primary criminality." In most cases, all three components were intermingled. In a considerable number of the boys, Sheldon discerned the component of "primary criminality." He thought that he had seen in his series of criminals the same thing Lombroso and Hooton had seen--true qualitative differences in personalities that, because of inadequate techniques, eluded them. Sheldon suggested that further biological studies may show that "delinquency may reside in the cellular morphogenotype." He maintained that the parents of his delinquents were themselves delinquent and in "very much the same way" and to about the same degree that their boys were.

Earlier, a German psychiatrist had reported that of the identical twins of 13 convicts, 10 had also served prison terms--but that of the nonidentical twins of 17 convicts, only 2 had. He concluded that criminality was biologically determined and hereditary. Dr. Franz Kallmann has advanced the view that schizophrenia is hereditary. He has reported that the mathematical probability of suffering schizophrenia is only .85 percent in the general population, but is 16.4 percent among the children of one schizophrenic parent; it is 14 percent for a nonidentical twin of a person who has schizophrenia, but it is 85.8 percent for the identical twin of a schizophrenic.

Psychiatry has always been split between those who attribute mental disorder to physical causes and those who insist it is of purely emotional origin.

Most psychiatrists do not consider the case for heredity proved (but it has never been disproved, either). Until a few years ago, the work of Hooton, Sheldon and Kallmann was largely ignored. Then, when doctors discovered the effects of certain tranquilizing drugs, such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and reserpine (Serpasil), on mental patients, the whole biological school of thought gained sudden ascendancy. Too sudden, perhaps--false hopes were sometimes raised, and the drugs have not proved to be cure-alls for mental illness. Nevertheless, interest in the drugs stimulated interest in biological research, especially biochemistry. To date, this work has produced no final answer on the "cause" of mental illness--indeed, it is unlikely to do so, since a single cause for so complex and varied a phenomenon is unlikely. But it has focused the interest of laboratory men on human behavior.

The second broad school of thought about the roots of criminality is sociological. As everybody knows, children who grow up in slums, badly treated at home and poorly educated at school, surrounded by teenage delinquency, are likely to end up in prison. Studies have documented it, from such great sociological works of the 1920s and 1930s at the University of Chicago as The Gold Coast and the Slum, The Gang and Delinquency Areas, down to the HARYOU work of the 1960s. They show that certain areas of the city favor criminal behavior--slums in the older parts of the city where housing is bad, schools are crowded, poverty is great, family and community life disorganized, recreational facilities few, and a tradition of delinquent behavior is passed on from one generation to another, as is the tradition of eating with a spoon. Other studies showed, too, that "white-collar crime"--embezzlement, tax evasion, and so on--increased as urbanization increased, removing the brake of neighborhood disapproval.

But the sociologists could not explain everything, as they themselves said. What of the slum boy who grows up straight? What of the suburban boy enjoying all the outward "advantages" who goes wrong? The sociologists called attention to many important problems of our cities, problems that are today made screamingly acute by the Negro revolution. But in the end, they concluded that of all the factors involved in criminality, the most important was the subtle emotional relationship among members of the family. And this is far closer to psychiatry than to sociology.

The third theory of the roots of crime is the psychiatric view: that crime is the product of psychic deficiency or disorder. Like the psychoses, the neuroses and the use of alcohol and drugs, crime is merely one way of solving problems, of resolving conflicts. The "sick" personality is the factor that predisposes a man to crime; the social environment triggers the explosion. (Sociologists would put it the other way around.) The difficulty with the psychiatric theory is that mental hospitals are full of psychotics who committed no crimes; while prisons are full of people who could not be called either psychotic or neurotic--and the free world is full of people who have suffered severe psychic traumas and yet have never committed felonies nor been declared insane.

Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck have attempted to synthesize the three views, matching 500 delinquent boys with 500 nondelinquent boys and studying them with Dr. William Sheldon's body-typing, psychology's Rorschach testing of personality structure and the techniques of sociology. They have found that although both groups of boys came from underprivileged neighborhoods, the delinquents' individual homes were markedly inferior to the nondelinquents' and so were their relations with their families; and they differed significantly from the nondelinquents in both body type and personality structure. The Gluecks concluded that delinquency results from the interplay of biological, psychological and cultural factors.

Hardly anyone today questions that the sociological and psychiatric views of criminality have validity, and some believe the biological view may be valid, too. None alone seems sufficient, for some criminals exhibit traits that support one theory but not the others, some exhibit two or all three and a few exhibit, at least as far as we can discern, none.

The members of this last group, the group that shows no discernible pathology--the seemingly "normal" boy who may have grown up in an "average" home and shows no biological predisposition to crime, the boy who kills for no apparent reason--are usually labeled "psychopathic personality." The psychopathic personality has been called "the wastebasket of psychiatry," into which are dumped all men who are not psychotic, not neurotic, not mentally deficient--yet there is something very wrong with them. Sometimes they are called sociopaths. They seem to be warriors, at war with the world; and upon occasion, some sort of psychic storm seems to overtake them and they kill "senselessly." The psychopath is not "insane." He knows who he is and where he is and what time it is. He dwells in our world, not the fantasy world of psychosis. He may be of above-average intelligence. But his emotions are out of kilter: his moral development, his "character," is deficient. He "knows" the consequences of criminal acts, but is unable to "feel" them. He never learns by experience. He never feels remorse or shame. He is never sorry he killed. He is the stranger among us. He rejects society and any obligation to it. He has never learned to wait. He lacks brakes. He is unpredictable. He is cold, remote; he cannot be reached by the chaplain's exhortations or the jailer's blows or the psychiatrist's ministrations. He is a wanderer; earlier in American history, he went West (and today he often dwells in the fringe jungles of our civilization). He is impulsive, immature and unstable. He commits the daring, dangerous crimes--bank robbery, assault, rape, cop killing. He is the mob's hired killer. He commits the "senseless" crimes. One man called him a "rebel without a cause."

We do not know what produces him. Perhaps he does not exist; perhaps "psychopathic personality" is only a term we have invented for those who fit no other class, for those who baffle us utterly. He may be the "born criminal" that Lombroso saw, the "biological inferior" that Hooton saw, the "primary criminal" that Sheldon saw, the teenage gang leader that the sociologists saw, the "defective superego" that the psychiatrists saw, the classic failure at resolving the Oedipal triangle that the psychoanalysts saw, the ratlike, animalistic aggressor without inhibition that the anthropologists saw, the "plain ornery cuss" that frontiersmen knew--or the "mad-dog killer" of tomorrow's headlines. And he may be only an imaginary beast we conjure up in the darkness of our ignorance.

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All this is of far more than theoretical importance. To put the matter somewhat extremely, if Sheldon is right, if criminality resides in the cellular morphogenotype, then the solution is sterilization; if the sociologists are right, then we must totally rebuild our cities; if the psychiatrists are right, we must put a psychiatrist in every kindergarten. Stating the matter thus extremely suggests the importance of theory to public policy. Public policy for the protection of society--what should it be? Ideally, it would await the answers of science. But it cannot; crime occurs; what should we do? And inextricably entwined with the protection of society is, in a free society, the protection of individual freedom.

It is no exaggeration to say that the administration of criminal justice is the best measure of any society. So measured, our society seems superior to, say, China's or Cuba's, though it exhibits serious flaws. Despite high-court strictures, too many police still hold suspects illegally and extract confessions by force. Too often the adversary system makes trials contests by trickery, not searches for truth. Overzealous prosecutors withhold important evidence; overzealous defense lawyers coach witnesses and even subvert jurors. Only recently have state courts been obliged to provide counsel in noncapital cases. Occasionally, the innocent are convicted; more often, we hope, the guilty go free. Eyewitnesses make mistaken identifications. Innocent men with previous criminal records are in great danger. The press influences juries. Political pressures and private prejudices sway judges. Inequitable sentences are common--a man can be sentenced to a long term of years for stealing cows in a rural area but given probation for robbery in the city. A man can spend his life on skid row, in and out of jail almost constantly, and never see a lawyer: Criminal justice simply doesn't operate here. Almost no adulterers, fornicators, drunken drivers and people who bet on the numbers are prosecuted, and probably only about 30 percent of those who commit major felonies. More poor men than rich men go to prison. So do, proportionately, more Negroes than white men. Almost no rich men are executed. One prosecutor who obtained 13 death penalties recalls that only four actually were executed and all four of those were Negroes.

But progress occurs. Increasingly, the courts protect the rights of the accused, despite ignorant outcries of "coddling criminals." The law moves slowly, but it moves, and one has the impression it is improving the quality of justice in this country.

One question the judge must decide is the limit of criminal responsibility. After 1843, the M'Naghten Rule applied--a man was responsible for his acts if he possessed the ability to know their nature and quality and to distinguish right from wrong. In 1954, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D. C., set forth instead the Durham Rule--a man is not criminally liable if his act was "the product of mental disease or defect." Last year, Congress repealed the Durham Rule, but the President vetoed the bill; the courts are still deciding cases in this shadowland, while eminent lawyers and jurists are seeking new formulas. Meanwhile, in trial courts, the shameful contest between opposing "expert" witnesses continues. The man accused of killing eight nurses in Chicago in July 1966 was adjudged fit to stand trial--and convicted. On the other hand, Howard Unruh, the Camden killer of 1949, was adjudged insane. Sometimes the decision on who goes to prison and who goes to a mental hospital seems almost capricious.

In the past, if a man was found not responsible because of mental illness, he was consigned to a mental hospital until he recovered his sanity and could stand trial. But a few months ago, a man who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity sued for release from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, claiming he had received no psychiatric treatment there; and the appellate court remanded the case: "The purpose of involuntary hospitalization is treatment, not punishment.... Absent treatment, the hospital is 'transformed ... into a penitentiary where one could be held indefinitely for no convicted offense....' The patient's right to treatment is clear." By thus asserting the "right to treatment," the court also spotlighted the facts that even such good public mental hospitals as St. Elizabeths are woefully unable to afford their patients treatment and, further, that the present state of both our understanding of mental disease and methods to treat it are woefully faulty.

Once a man is adjudged responsible and guilty and sent to prison, society, in the person of the warden, guards and, in more enlightened jurisdictions, social workers and psychologists and even psychiatrists, undertakes the task of "rehabilitating" him--reshaping him so he can someday safely be set free. This effort is, almost without exception, a farce. How can they rehabilitate a man in prison unless they know what drove him there in the first place? Teaching a convict to weld fenders may keep him out of mischief while he is in prison, but it has little to do with what made him a criminal and is unlikely to change him and so prevent him from repeating his crime after he is released. Teaching a boy to read, encouraging his relatives to visit him and write to him, providing a chaplain and a counselor are all very well; but if his cellmate is an experienced bank robber, he is more likely to heed that elder's wisdom than the counselor's or the teacher's or the chaplain's. Keeping a bank robber busy in a prison industry may keep him out of trouble in prison; it is not likely to persuade him to mend his ways. Putting a man out on an honor farm or conservation camp may convince him it is better to stay than to run away; it is not likely to make him a law-abiding citizen. Providing a counselor to help him with his prison-made problems, such as a faithless wife, may help him sleep better in his cell; it has nothing to do with rehabilitation. For it was not illiteracy, or "poor work habits," or indifferent relatives, or any of the rest that brought him to prison in the first place; it was something else, we know not what. And until we do know, rehabilitation inside prison is a myth. Indeed, prison, far from protecting society, is society's enemy. It does not fit men for freedom. It prisonizes men, makes them wholly unfit for life in the complicated free world. It teaches far more young men to hate than to repent, teaches them criminal techniques, not lawful vocations. The fact is that most "rehabilitation" programs are designed to ease the warden's lot--and no wonder, for big prisons are so crowded, so heterogeneous and so filled with the world's misfits and failures and warriors that simply keeping the place running without riot is all but impossible. Busy, reasonably contented convicts are less likely to mutiny than idle malcontents. But this has nothing to do with rehabilitation. The busiest, most contented convict in the prison may be the most dangerous to release; he has learned to live in prison, which means he is unfit to live outside it. Only a hardcore few dangerous criminals need maximum-security imprisonment to protect society--but thousands upon thousands of other miscreants get it. Nearly all are worsened by it. Some boys could safely be released after the first night in the prison reception cell. On the other hand, some armed robbers ought to be locked up forever; they are warriors and they will continue their war on the world whenever able. Some murderers--situational murderers--could safely be set free the day after their arrest. One such was called the Spaghetti Man. He and his family had been on relief a long time. They had no job, no money, and they had nothing to eat but spaghetti. Finally his luck turned. He got a job as a laborer. He brought home a ten-dollar advance on his wages and told his wife to go out the next day and buy the biggest sirloin steak she could find. That night, he came home and found her drunk, wearing a new hat and swaying back and forth in front of the stove. What was she cooking? Spaghetti. He knocked her downstairs and her neck was broken. He was uselessly sentenced to 1 to 14 years.

Increasingly enlightened thought holds that punishment should fit the criminal, not the crime. Since punishment alone seems not to have successfully protected society, it is now generally believed that not punishment but treatment should be the goal. But in the present state of knowledge, this seems almost an idle dream.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of the men sent to prison someday return to free society. Most return worse than they left. And about one half of them commit new crimes. It is surprising that the record is not worse.

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The true interest of society lies not in apprehending, dealing justly with and imprisoning criminals after they have committed crimes but in identifying them before they commit them. Sometimes this is possible. Warning signs may appear early in a boy's life--he may hide things senselessly, develop odd eating habits, throw his mother's perfume down the sink, become afraid to walk on grass, seem polite but remote and strange, fall behind in his studies, set fire to his parents' bedroom, break furniture and, growing older, molest a child and ransack a neighbor's house without stealing anything. A few years ago, a boy in New Jersey did just this. No criminal charges were filed, but his worried parents took him voluntarily to New Jersey's famed new diagnostic center. A doctor there, after studying him for a month as a voluntary paying patient, got the "diagnostic impression" of schizophrenia but did not consider him sick enough to recommend commitment to a mental hospital. He said later that if the boy had been sent to him by juvenile court, he would have recommended either putting him in an institution or sending him home under supervision. But he had come as a voluntary patient; so when his 30 days ended, he went home--New Jersey had no legal hold on him. Five years later, he strangled a high school girl.

Few parents of criminals go to so much trouble to try to help their boy before it happens. Few institutions are as good as New Jersey's diagnostic center. What can we expect from less conscientious parents and worse state institutions?

Thumbing through prison files, one finds with dreary monotony a terrible if less bizarre story repeated--drunken father and absent mother and truant child, rebellious boy and petty pilfering and juvenile court, runaway boy and disciplinary school, car theft and probation, carrying concealed weapons and broken probation and reformatory, parole and broken parole and reformatory, release and armed robbery and penitentiary--and so on, sometimes to the electric chair.

All too often, patients tell private psychiatrists they intend to kill somebody--and do. There were private warnings in the lives of both the Austin sniper and the assassin of President Kennedy. People ask, Why wasn't something done? Why doesn't a diagnostic center or a juvenile court, discovering warning signals early in a boy's life, isolate him immediately from society? The answer is that the patient's--and the boy's--rights are involved. Courts and psychiatrists have no legal right to lock up somebody because they think that someday he might kill. Not every wayward boy turns out to be a murderer. And anyway, we simply cannot put a psychiatrist in every kindergarten--there are fewer than 20,000 psychiatrists in the United States and most are in private practice. And even that is no sure answer, as our New Jersey case indicates.

Nevertheless, those two cases--the slum boy and the strange New Jersey boy--do suggest three lines of action.

The slum boy might have a chance if the slum were eliminated. Although slums do not "cause" crime, the high crime rate there--and the high percentage of Negroes in prisons, not because Negroes are "more criminal" but because they are more disadvantaged--argues powerfully that we must spend the billions necessary to alter fundamentally the character of our disintegrating cities.

Second, the chance of identifying troubled youngsters early argues powerfully for spending more public money to train psychiatrists and school guidance directors, establishing juvenile diagnostic centers and putting our minds to work on how to protect society against incipient criminality without infringing on the rights of the youngsters.

Third, prison reform is essential. It is not too much to say that the prison system as it exists should be abolished. It does not reform the criminal. It fails to protect society. When we know how to prevent crime or rehabilitate criminals, we will not put them into prison to do it. We can abolish prisons. Meanwhile, we ought to stop making men worse in prisons. Various steps can be taken, including these: Build a wide variety of prison farms and camps, medium-security institutions and facilities for the criminally insane, to permit classification and segregation of inmates; raze such gigantic maximum-security institutions as the Michigan State Penitentiary at Jackson, or at least break them up into small units; put under Civil Service and raise the salaries of guards, parole and probation supervisors and prison classification experts; increase the supply of psychiatric advice to parole and classification boards; let about half the inmates out of all maximum-security prisons; and enforce ironclad security measures on dangerous men.

But, in the long run, what is needed is more research into the causes of criminality. Research is going forward at several private institutions, but not enough of it. At present, no Federal research program on crime exists. One would be costly, but so is crime.

It seems likely that all such programs--rebuilding the cities, reorganizing the prison system, training personnel and staffing schools and diagnostic centers, and research--may have to await resolution of the Vietnam war. But perhaps even before money becomes available, forward planning could start and would probably be more fruitful than further Congressional debate on the "gun law." The ultimate emphasis should be on a program of research bearing directly on the roots of criminality. For until we know far more than we know now, there is not much we can do to protect ourselves. What we don't know can kill us.