Savage Spawn (9 page)

Sure, a black market will develop in response to such gun laws, as it does with any prohibition. And sure, urban gangbangers will continue to get hold of weaponry. But the likes of Golden, Johnson, and Kinkel are a lot more likely to be inhibited from taking up arms in the service of psychopathy. They got
their
arsenals from Mom and Dad and Gramps.

Restricting children from having access to firearms should be backed up with real judicial muscle—quick and unconditional imposition of jail or reformatory sentences for possession of pistols, rifles, or shotguns for youthful offenders, and even longer jail time, combined with outrageously high monetary fines, for the adults who allow guns to fall into the hands of minors. Zero tolerance is needed because the stakes are high. It's worked to almost completely eliminate drunk driving in the Scandinavian countries, in the absence of any concomitant decrease in overall Scandinavian alcoholism.

Two other quick fixes: The first is to
take the warnings of violent kids seriously
. When they say they're going to kill someone, they mean it. Arrest them for making terrorist threats. The second is to
take your time figuring out what to do with them
. Be extremely reluctant to release them back into the community. (I'm no constitutional scholar, but the fact that we routinely restrict the rights of minors via curfew laws and limited licenses suggests there would be few successful legal challenges to this type of preventative custody.) And second, when youngsters murder coldly, lock them up till they die.

Now for long-term solutions.

If, as the evidence suggests, a cold emotional system is most frequently the result of maltreatment, we need to focus our attention much more consistently and assiduously upon the detection, prevention, and remediation of child neglect and abuse. Policies that emphasize reintegration of the abused child into his family need to be looked at extremely critically. Obviously, if biological parents are motivated to change, we need to work with them. However, by insisting on “family unification” at all costs, in many cases we are simply tossing bait to the sharks. Loving, warm, caring foster care and adoptive homes are optimal solutions, but bad foster homes are worse than good, or even mediocre, institutional care.

Though the notion of large-scale orphanages and similar group placements may evoke Dickensian images, well-designed group settings are significantly kinder and more helpful places and better vehicles for moral training for abused children than are bad homes (68). Some of the most productive and ethical citizens around are members of my parents' generation, individuals orphaned during the world wars and raised in quality orphanages.

Along with vigilantly locating abused and neglected kids, we need to embark on an extremely aggressive search for, and identification of, youngsters at risk for violent criminality. There will be substantial overlap between the two processes.

With regard to picking out the dangerous kids, there is no need to fund commissions or to dissect the problem academically. We already
know
whom to look for: those who display precocious aggression and antisocial behavior, reactive or proactive, for whatever reason. A relatively tiny but important sample.

In some cases the families that spawn youngsters who lean toward criminality may be workable, and all attempts should be made to retrain bad parents as well as dangerous kids—but not at the expense of the children.

In other instances a draconian solution will be necessary: abrogation of parental custody and removal of children from the violent, chaotic homes most likely to raise habitual criminals. This needs to occur
well before adolescence
. As noted, data about age as it relates to rehabilitation are absent. My clinical hunch is that by the time a seriously violent boy is eleven or twelve, in most cases it may be too late to modify his behavior meaningfully. And in fact, research has shown that police contact before eleven is an extremely strong predictor of a lifetime of criminality (69). This may be because of neurological changes that commonly occur in the frontal and prefrontal lobes around this period, “hard-wiring” patterns of behavior (70).

Assuming we locate high-risk youngsters, what next? Conventional, insight-oriented psychotherapy is of little use when dealing with antisocial behavior. Techniques do exist, however, that
can
help.

High-risk kids need to be placed in very structured, loving environments, free of abuse, where punishment is noncorporal and is used at a minuscule level. Nonviolent behavior needs to be taught to them as if they are majoring in morality, using explicit lessons delivered by warm, caring adult disciplinarians who control the rewards their young charges receive. Goodies must be contingent upon attainment of prosocial behavioral goals mapped out in detail, such as courtesy, empathy, kindness, and nonviolent problem solving, as well as academic achievement.

Yes, we're talking about behavior therapy. Notwithstanding the sad case of Alex, the recidivist fictional thug-hero of
A Clockwork Orange
, behavior therapy works extremely well when properly and consistently directed at children young enough to still be emotionally and ethically malleable, and when combined with backup treatments that address biological deficiencies. (Burgess's novel featured a specific type of aversive Pavlovian conditioning, punishment for bad thoughts—a technique that would not be expected to work very well with psychopaths. And Alex was already far too old for any kind of “treatment.”)

High-risk kids need to receive intensive
schooling in morality
—consistent, structured, detailed lessons about ethics, honesty, and consideration for others, as well as finely tuned behavioral tutoring in specific methods of dealing with moral issues and puzzles. Children leaning toward criminality who also suffer from learning disabilities and hyperactivity—a substantial majority—will also require extensive academic coaching for the former and medication for the latter.

Though I have dismissed psychotherapy as a primary treatment for psychopathy—an assertion no serious student of the subject would dispute—this does not imply that we should never talk to these kids about their problems nor allow them to express their feelings (appropriately). We must never forget that most of them have been conceived in chaos and raised with cruelty. Morality training will not work unless it is carried out in an atmosphere of genuine warmth and affection—first, because all kids need to be listened to and to be valued, and second, because one of the most effective ways of teaching is by example. If we want to turn high-risk kids into empathetic, caring human beings, they must be on the receiving end of empathy and caring.

So counseling for behavioral manifestations of sadness and fear and loneliness
does
have a role in moral training. But in the case of violent kids, the first priority needs to be changing maladaptive patterns of behavior. Precocious violence sets up self-fulfilling prophecies of its own and is so obstructive and damaging in the way it blocks out appropriate emotions and positive behaviors that counseling is likely to be ineffective until the violence is eliminated.

We need to get high-risk kids to a point where they can
do good things
. Only then can they earn rewards for being moral and generate a positive learning cycle that overpowers the learned-violence paradigm of their former lives.

This comprehensive approach remains, sadly, an ideal. Removal of high-risk kids from rotten homes assumes that there's somewhere to put them, and we are far from that situation. It is also predicated upon the availability of an army of experts to teach criminally inclined boys the explicit dimensions of moral behavior and nonviolent, nonexploitative methods of obtaining stimulation, as well as platoons of tutors and physicians working to remediate learning disabilities.

But the talent and techniques do exist. What we need is the will and the courage to suggest and implement strong solutions. Would it be expensive? Not at all, given the savings, human and financial, that accrue when crime rates plummet and the energies of high-risk youngsters are redirected toward industry and away from interaction with the welfare and the criminal justice systems. Currently we are experiencing sharp drops in crime across the country. Some of the decrease can be attributed to more industrious policing and longer prison sentences of the “three strikes” variety. But a good chunk is also due to a factor we
cannot
control: demographics, namely, the fact that there are fewer males in the fifteen- to twenty-year-old age range. Population profiles change cyclically, so let's not get too complacent. Eventually there will come a time when the proportion of violent youth rises sharply, and no policing or imprisoning will completely handle the tide of crimes they will commit. Wouldn't it be smart to be prepared?

Where will the money for group placement and moral training come from? Certainly no new taxes should be levied. That would be impolitic as well as unnecessary. Nor should funds be leeched by the Washington reflex to create commissions and committees. We don't
have
to discuss the issue ad nauseam. We already know what needs to be done.

For progress to be made, the romanticization of childhood to the point where it leads to head-in-the-sand denial about the brutal realities of abused children and the harsh realities of psychopathy needs to cease.

Boys will be boys, but violent boys will be dangerous.

Money should be transferred from dead-end research areas, such as media violence, into clinical programs for early identification and treatment of pathological childhood aggression.

We need to stop paying for programs that are doomed to failure, such as a project I recently read about where high-school students were to be offered a three-week cable TV series that preached against the use of violence. First of all, by the time kids are in high school it's too late. Second, three weeks of video indoctrination is unlikely to accomplish anything. Third, the measure of success used—filling out a questionnaire about aggression—has no relevance to real-life violence. And finally, targeting entire school bodies is preaching to the converted.

Forget about global approaches that attempt to change entire ethnic groups or neighborhoods. They're as sensible as giving chemotherapy to patients without cancer. It's a lot smarter—and cheaper—to focus upon a very small but dangerous minority: the really scary kids.

Even if there exists a small subsample of well-brought-up children for whom cold-bloodedness and subsequent psychopathy are totally inborn genetic traits, there is no reason to throw up our hands. Genetically linked behaviors, though they may be resistant to change,
can
be modified by the environment. Take the case of phenylketonuria (PKU), a metabolic disorder that once led inevitably to severe mental retardation. Now it is completely treatable with dietary manipulation. Two other triumphs of environmental tinkering with genetically mediated defects are so commonplace that we no longer give them a second thought: eyeglasses and orthodonture.

This is not to say that fixing genetic psychopathy is as simple as straightening an overbite or clearing up a myopic haze. But changing the environment
can
alter genetic variables.

I have worked personally with numerous children, such as retarded youngsters and those with genetic defects, whose severe behavioral problems were related to inborn factors but who responded extremely well to behavior therapy. One particularly fascinating case that I published in 1977 was the treatment of a seven-year-old boy with a condition known as 47XYY karyotype—possession of an extra male chromosome.

First discovered in 1961, 47XYY was implicated in violent, aggressive, antisocial behavior when the trait was found to exist in a disproportionately high number of Scottish prison inmates. Several years later, an extremely notorious XYY surfaced—mass murderer Richard Speck—and criminal defense attorneys rushed to create a genetic apologia for violence. For a while the strategy worked, as some defendants were actually acquitted because of chromosomal abnormalities and others had their sentences reduced (71). Subsequent research showed the original Scottish tabulations to be flawed—based upon an incorrect frequency of 47XYY in the noncriminal population—and several other studies revealed no link between the extra male chromosome and criminality.

Whatever the cause for the behavioral problems of the boy I saw—let's call him Bobby—he was more than a handful and needed to be dealt with immediately.

I treated Bobby in the same room where I'd attempted to connect with Tim. Barely seven, he was small, skinny, blond, and blue-eyed, was mildly retarded (IQ score of 79), displayed symptoms of hyperactivity despite treatment with Ritalin, and had unclear speech. Three mild but noticeable physical abnormalities were present: an extremely weak chin, shortened index fingers, and a small skull. Bobby's parents were happily married, and he was their only child. At the time of his birth, Bobby's mother was thirty-nine. His delivery had been normal. However, she had suffered three previous miscarriages.

Bobby's problem behaviors included defiance, refusal to feed himself and storing food in his cheeks, insomnia and interrupting his parents' sleep, aggression against playmates, public masturbation, hitting and biting his parents, and tantrums so severe they included the hurling of furniture and other large objects. He'd shattered all the windows in the family home, and the panes had been replaced by panels of plastic. His pediatrician had prescribed the Ritalin for his hyperactivity, and though the drug had been partially effective, it had produced no carryover to other areas.

Bobby's physical problems were conspicuous, so the temptation to attribute his behavioral problems to organic, unmodifiable causes was strong, even though it was by no means clear that any of his difficulties were related to the extra chromosome (most XYYs are of normal intelligence).