The Never Ending Story... of Violence

By MICHELLE CIRIACRUZ

The road to violence is somehow akin to mythology.

     The Arabian Nights, the thousand and one nights of a woman’s desperate gamble for life, holds the pattern of violence in the way its tales are interlinked. By ingenuously twisting the end of every tale into the beginning of a new one, the teller of the tales, the sultan’s wife, was able to save herself from the fatal caprice of a mad husband.

     In a similar manner, we have always seen the perpetuation of violence as a never ending cycle. Violence begets violence, so to speak. We also tend to see it as an irrational explosive expression of the psyche, made horrifying by the physical damage and emotional damage it inflicts.  

     But Lonnie Athens, criminologist—and maverick—disputes this analogy. In a lifetime of close association with violent criminals of all types and malevolence, he has come to several conclusions that defy and belie the prevailing theorems in criminal behavior. His approach, to painstakingly dissect and analyze the violent act through one-on-one interviews with convicted murderers and rapists, bore witness instead to a process Athens calls “violentization.”

     It is the four-stage process by which the violent actor’s conformity to a profile is negated. “Poverty, race, subculture, mental illness, child abuse, gender, are all disqualified, singly and collectively, as explanations for criminal violence by the sheer number of exceptions within every category that even a casual investigation reveals,” says Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer prize Winning author of Why They Kill, The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.

     Although sociology and psychology are saturated with ideas that aim to demystify the criminal mind, to Athens, they do so out of pretense, since in all of them is missing the essential interpretative tool, which is the direct involvement with the orchestrator and owner of the violent expressions. He says, “one must at least see, touch, smell, and examine,” to be able to know.

     Both Athens and Rhodes had first-hand experience of violence.

     When Athens was growing up, he had Pete the Greek for a father, a man who used his fist and his words to harm, and sometimes to mangle. Scenes from Athens’s childhood run from one bloody tableaux to another: standing outside his house brandishing a brick against a father who just pulled a knife on him; crouching on the floor while rifle shots exploded around him; witnessing a woman screaming for her life as she was stabbed repeatedly through a shattered door frame.

     Ten-year-old Rhodes got beaten up and starved by a real-life wicked stepmother. He and his older brother suffered this abuse for two years until, eventually, they were rescued and sent to a private boys’ home, where Rhodes was to recover 30 pounds of weight in just three months.

     Strangely enough, instead of growing up with an aversion, or being warped by human violence, they grew up with a compulsion to find out what makes it tick. They also believed that their background makes them ideal scholars of it, because they had lived with violence for quite some time––this misfortune would be balanced out with their better capacity to relate to its concepts and reality. Athens himself recognizes the points in his own life when he could easily have gone according to the pattern of “violentization,” if other factors, for which he was thankful, did not intervene.

     Despite Athens’s circumstances, his inquiring mind led him past high school into a college scholarship. There his intellectual history will marked his alliance with and estrangement from several schools of thoughts within sociology. In an attempt to trace the crystallization of psychosocial elements as they combine into violent acts, he at first embraced and then spurned the statistical style of correlating variables to come up with deductions of behavioral patterns.

     But as he discovered criminology, he also soon realized the impotence of the quantitative method to get to the internal dynamics of crime—the decision process, if there is any, and so marshaled his intuitive forces to work in an entirely opposite line of study—qualitative sociology, where universals that could account for every instance of a phenomenon could emerge.

     It sent Athens to a decade of prison walls and close calls with vicious thugs and malicious jail guards. He published a book about the results of his prison interviews, and this is how Rhodes, scouting for new territory to explore for his writing, found Athens. Athens’s approach and explanations to violent behavior, as well as their credibility to certain prominent violent persons and events, became the material for the book Why They Kill.

Sense and Sensibility

"Neither Athens nor anyone else has found a way to reverse the process once it's complete." [Instead], Athens's work supports timely intervention anywhere along the way to and through violentization." -- Rhodes

     Implied but needing no distinct statement is the device of Athens himself to draw the readers into the ugly world of violent people. His life from the moment he was born already contained all the sordid details people in love with drama go after. His personality, like his biography, is vivid—frightening people with his forceful front. One can imagine Rhodes using his book’s human resource as Rhodes’s own personal case study.

     This observation is, ironically, at odds with Athens’s conviction, which defines violence as “not glamorous.” It only somehow gained a seeming of glamor when medical and scientific literature echoed concepts like passion crimes and brief reactive psychosis out into the public’s imperfect consumption to be regurgitated as stock phrases.

     This thinking inevitably gained widespread acceptance. It’s a good theory; it comforts people to think people kill without volition—these phrases, “no apparent motive,” “he just snapped,” and “he couldn’t help himself,” idealize a lack of evil. It happened because, in plain speak, these people could not help themselves. Athens lambastes it, of course: a comfortable theory does not a correct one make. “Murders are never senseless from the murderer’s point of view,” Rhodes notes.

     Motives, some of which might go undetectable to psychologists because they seem trivial, always inform criminal acts—a basic premise in Athens’s work. We thus remain clueless and motives stay esoteric because students of human behavior have an understandable (but regretful) reluctance to be around criminals for too long and so they study them only from the safe zones of observers, which leaves a lot of ground uncovered.

     Athens writes: “The data reveal that violent people consciously construct violent plans of action before they commit violent criminal acts.” The temporal argument is irrelevant—the organization of an action may seem instantaneous to both actor and observer; it does not, however, eliminate cognition and reasoning from the process. Thus he realized that people kill not in spite of themselves but because of themselves.

     He became an expert in recording this cold dynamics of violence, extracted from chronicles of brutality. In the critical moments before violent expressions, the actor’s interpretation of the situation, bolstered by the development of his decision-making process as well as his  self-image at the time, always comes into play. A robber might see his intended victim’s resistance as frustrative of what he wants to do, which might rouse a violent response. Now, depending on his internal debate, whether he is able to call up a restraining judgment, like fear of legal sanctions, he would let loose or not. Whereas an actor with a nonviolent self-image might only have committed his violent act out of a physically defensive interpretation. Athens also cites several types of violent criminal acts, of which the ultraviolent is the most dangerous, since they use violence “not only to defend themselves or to push people around but also purely as means of self-expression.”

     Interestingly, Athens finds a person’s violent criminal acts to be always consistent with his self-image at the time of expression, his actions therefore acceptable to the ego—further pointing out the validity of his major premise: “Violent criminals are responsible for their violent crimes.”

The Phantom Menace

     Having ascertained the decision in the act, Athens sets out to identify the social process that led to the creation of violent criminals. “When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.”

     Athens had to have a feel first for the personal interface to which the outside world manipulates the psyche or the internal world. The environment does make out a sort of community of attitudes that people internalize and incorporate into their mental and emotional attitudes, but Athens feels this only succeeds in explaining the conformity to a group, and not the singularity to which violent criminals are prone to. He undervalues its impact in relation to that of the primary persons in the actor’s life. Their lifetime legacy on a person and his constant communication with it he describes as the phantom community.

     This is a crucial component to Athens’s entire philosophy yet this concept still seems a little vague, despite Rhodes’s largely successful efforts to focus on the essential among the repertoire of highly intellectual literature that guided Athens’s intellectual history. Perhaps, it’s just me; when Athens was just beginning his intellectual search for answers he himself often felt intimidated and inadequate to truly apprehend the concepts of the great thinkers in his field. Or perhaps, this is where Rhodes fails to get to the point quickly enough.

     Anyway, having answered “how,” Athens now seeks out to answer “what” and “why.” What makes people decide to go through with violence when so many people do not? Why are they different? Can we find answers in their past?

     Yes, but not exclusively. The social experiences involved in the conversion of an individual from one state to another could span a course that might still be underway and therefore incomplete. They, however, can be identified, are sometimes right before our eyes, and might even be the conditioned way we treat our children.

     Brutalization initiates—when an individual is subjugated physically or verbally, made to witness the subjugation of another, or coached to assume the role of an aggressor. This experience inevitably produces belligerency that once a certain degree is reached, with sufficient provocation, might degenerate into violent performances. Virulency finalizes the process of violentization. The victim metamorphoses into the violent criminal personality. After experiencing social trepidation then enjoyment of his notoriety, “he now firmly resolves to attack people physically with the serious intention of gravely harming or even killing them for the slightest or no provocation whatsoever.”

Violent Playground

     If the conclusions of Athens were indeed universal, they should apply to other violent careers as well—whether contemporary or not. Rhodes tests the concepts of “violentization” on celebrated cases—Cheryl Crane, Mike Tyson, Lee Harvey Oswald, even examining the generally brutal way Medieval Age people brought up children and the military trains its soldiers—and realizes “violentization” does explain a lot of things.

     For instance, Crane who grew up under a mother, famous not just for her looks and acting career but also for her string of abusive boyfriends, who would occasionally turn their attention to the daughter. When Crane was 10, Tarzan, or rather Lex Barker, who filled that role in the TV series, raped her. Telling Lana Turner, her mother, availed her only condemnations and jealous accusations. Rhodes observed that Turner herself was making a bid at indirect yet effective violent coaching upon her daughter. Needing a protector but unable to free herself from destructive relationships, she manipulated her increasingly belligerent daughter to fill that role. Crane’s “violentization” climaxed with the stabbing of Turner’s latest boyfriend, during a violent altercation between the couple.

A Time to Kill

"The predatory violent actions of ultraviolent criminals will either prevent the educational and rehabilitative programs from realizing their goals or negate any gains that may be achieved through their implementation" -- Athens

     Is “violentization” significant but not unique to violent criminals? Athens had to look further to answer this. He needed to see if there were people who should have become dangerous violent criminals but had not done so, so he expanded his studies to nonaccidental subjects. The results confirmed its uniqueness to violent criminals. He also had to defend the appropriateness of the process to all types of people when exceptions challenge—how does it account for the “good” children from “good” families becoming “bad?” Athens maintains these unusual cases have surely acquired violence-related experiences in their backgrounds, which would not be disclosed without a thorough and painstaking investigation of their biographies.

     Why They Kill stands out with its pioneering literature on typologies, but it ends on a dismal note. It does offer unconventional, and, again, controversial proposals regarding criminal justice, but they give little encouragement. Athens contends: “The predatory violent actions of ultraviolent criminals will either prevent the educational and rehabilitative programs from realizing their goals or negate any gains that may be achieved through their implementation.”

     And despite what the book gives us—revolutionary ideas, and perhaps increased clarity to our understanding of why people kill, Rhodes points out, frankly enough, that it does not hold the antidote to this psychosocial aberration. “Neither Athens nor anyone else has found a way to reverse the process once it’s complete.”

     Instead, says Rhodes: “Athens’s work supports timely intervention anywhere along the way to and through ‘violentization.’” In other words, rehabilitation is only effective for as long as the process of “violentization” has not yet snapped shut.

Great Expectations

     The book has two major voices, Athens’s and Rhodes’s, but both work hard at being true to their subjects, as shown by this chilling dialogue in one of the numerous case studies: “Oh s**t, one of those dirty SOBs has gouged out my eyes. Help me, help me; I can’t see, I can’t see, I’m blind.”

     Athens demanded brutal frankness from the inmates he was interviewing. Any sign of inconsistency and their input would be totally disregarded from the study...

For those who came to the book with high expectations, seeking absolute answers, Why They Kill delivers... but only to a point. The readers must still realize though that at the time of Rhodes’s collaboration with Athens, Athens had only been interviewing criminals and people with known backgrounds of violence. So far, when it comes to the choir boys-turned-serial killers, Athens only has his conviction that they must have also gone through the “violentization” process. It was just happening so discreetly that family, friends, and neighbors remained oblivious until the violence came out into the open.

     The readers must also remember that the direction of Athens’s study is unsettling to a lot of people, research grant people included. If nothing else, this book is exemplary in the way Rhodes gambled with his writing career and efforts for an unfashionable school of thought.

     We can be certain, however, that it will allow us inside the mind at the moment of violent expression. Inside, the depths and complexity might not be less inscrutable to our imperfect senses, but at least, Athens and Rhodes are able to make our glimpse a little less dark.