Unit 3 Crime and Punishment

Text 3.1 Seeking the Roots of Violence

It’s tempting to make excuses for violence. The mugger came from a broken home and was trying to lift himself out of poverty. The wife beater was himself abused as a child. The juvenile murderer was exposed to Motley Crue records and Terminator movies. But do environmental factors wholly account for the seven-year-old child who tortures frogs? The teenager who knifes a teacher? The employee who slaughters work mates with an AK-47? Can society’s ills really be responsible for all the savagery that is sweeping America? Or could some people be predisposed to violence by their genes? But not if the research is suppressed. Investigators of the link between biology and crime find themselves caught in one of the most bitter controversies to hit the scientific community in years. The subject has become so politically incorrect in America that even raising it requires more bravery than many scientists can muster. Critics from the social sciences have denounced biological research efforts as intellectually unjustified and politically motivated. African-American scholars and politicians are particularly incensed; they fear that because of the high crime rates in inner cities, blacks will be wrongly branded as a group programmed for violence.

The backlash has taken a tall. In the past year, proposed U.S. government research initiative that would have included biological studies has been assailed, and a scheduled conference on genetics and crime has been canceled. A session on heredity and violence at February’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science turned into a politically correct critique of the research; no defenders of such studies showed up on the panel. “One is basically under attack in this field”, observes one federal researcher, who like many is increasingly hesitant to talk about his work publicly.

Some of the distrust is understandable, given the tawdry history of earlier efforts to link biology and crime. A century ago, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso claimed that sloping foreheads, jutting chins and long arms were signs of born criminals. In the 1960s, scientists advanced the now discounted notion that men who carry an XYY chromosome pattern, rather than the normal XY patter, were predisposed to becoming violent criminals. Fresh interest in the field reflects a recognition that violence has become one of the worst public-health threats in the U.S. The U.S. is the most violent nation in the industrialized world. Homicide is the second most frequent cause of death among Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 (after accidents) and the most common among young black men and women. More than 2million people are beaten, knifed, shot or otherwise assaulted each year, 23,000 of them fatally. No other industrialized nation comes close: Scotland, which ranked second in homicides, has less than one-forth the U.S. rate.

This cultural disparity indicates that there are factors in American society- such as the availability of guns, economic inequity and a violence- saturated culture- that are not rooted in human biology. Nevertheless, a susceptibility to violence might partly be genetic. Errant genes play a role in many behavioral disorders, including schizophrenia and manic depression. “In virtually every behavior we look at, genes have an influence- one person will behave one way, another person will behave another way”, observes Gregory Carey, assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics. It stands to reason that genes might contribute to violent activity as well.

Some studies of identical twins who have been reared apart suggest that when one twin has a criminal conviction, the other twin is more likely to have committed a crime than is the case with fraternal twins. Other research with adopted children indicates that those whose biological parents broke the law are more likely to become criminals than are adoptees whose natural parents were law-abiding.

No one believes there is a single “criminal gene” that programs people to maim or murder. Rather, a person’s genetic makeup may give a subtle nudge violent actions. For one thing, genes help control production of behavior-regulating chemicals. One suspect substance is the neurotransmitter serotonin. Experiments at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in North Carolina suggest that extremely aggressive monkeys have lower levels of serotonin than do more passive peers. Animals with low serotonin are more likely to bite, slap or chase other monkeys. Such animals also seem less social: they spend more time alone and less in close body contact with peers.

Findings like these may be essential to understanding-and perhaps eventually controlling- chronic wrongdoers, argue proponents of this research. “Most youth or adults who commit a violent crime will not commit a second”, observes Kagan. “The group we are concerned with are the recidivists- those who have been arrested many times. This is the group for whom there might be some biological contribution”. Kagan predicts that within 25 years, biological and genetic tests will be able to pick out about 15 children of every thousand who may have violent tendencies. But only one of those 15 children will actually become violent, he notes. Do we tell the mothers of all 15 that their kids might be violent? How are mothers then going to react to their children if we do that?”

It is just such dilemmas that have so alarmed critics. How will the information be used? Some opponents believe the research runs the danger of making women seem prisoners of their hormones”.

TIME,April 1993

Text 3.2 The Devil’s Disciple

Westley Dodd may die at the end of a rope, but he leaves behind a controversial law against sex offenders.

It takes a certain act of faith, the first time a mother and father let their children go out and play by themselves. Faith that sons and daughters will cross streets safely, that they will abide by their curfew, that they will remember not to talk to strangers. Faith that when they go to the park, someone like Westley Allan Dodd will not be there waiting for them.

Westley Dodd is the man who shook the faith of enough people in the state of Washington to prompt legislators to pass the U.S. most unforgiving, possibly unconstitutional, laws against sexual predators. After his sentencing for the kidnap, rape and murder of three little boys in 1989, hardened reporters who covered the case sought counseling to help them handle what they had heard in court.

Throughout his years as a child molester, Dodd showed a gift for rebuking the justice system. With each arrest, he passed like a cold breeze through the court system and mental health institutions and wound up back where he had started: hunting children in public parks and devising new schemes to kidnap, mutilate, drown, strangle or suffocate them. Time and again, the courts reduced the charges, suspended the sentence, offered therapy over incarceration. “Each time I entered treatment, I continued to molest children”, he told the court. “I liked molesting children and did what I had to do to avoid jail so I could continue molesting”.

Dodd says he molested dozens of children and never served a sentence longer than four months in jail. Once while baby-sitting for some friends, he molested their 10-year-old son. After one arrest in Seattle in 1987, he told police that his urge was “predatory and uncontrollable”. His one-year sentence was suspended. In the summer of 1989, Dodd moved to Vancouver, Washington, and began stalking children. “I was getting bored- I didn’t have a TV”, Dodd told police. The park, he said, looked like “a good hunting ground”. One day he selected 19 different children he considered killing: 15 boys, 4 girls. One by one, he ruled them out, often because they were with an adult. He returned the next evening, bringing shoelaces to tie up his victims and a 15-cm-fish-fillet knife that he did inside an Ace bandage drawn tight around his ankle.

He came upon two brothers. Cole and William Neer, who were taking a shortcut through the park on their way home to supper. He tied them up, molested one, stabbed them both, then fled back to his apartment as police and ambulance sirens wailed in the distance. Dodd wrote about the thrill of it. “I was kind of afraid that I was going to get caught”, he told the Oregonian. “And then as I watched the papers, I realized that the police didn’t have any clues”.

Seven weeks later, Dodd found a four-year-old boy playing alone in an elementary school playground. He coaxed Lee Iseli home with him to play some games. “When he got there, I told him he had to be real quiet because my neighbor didn’t like kids”, Dodd said. He then stripped off Lee Iseli’s clothes, tied the boy to the bed and began taking Polaroid pictures as he molested the child. He later mounted the photos in 10-cm-by-15-cm pink photo album labeled FAMILY MEMORIES.

Police were shocked at the pitiless confessions Dodd offered freely upon arrest. His crimes easily persuaded a jury to condemn him, but they had a far more incendiary effect on public sentiment toward sex offenders in general. As Dodd’s story unfolded in court, pressure mounted on Governor Booth Gardner and state lawmakers to pass what became a uniquely tough law. It requires that convinced sex offenders register wherever they move; that authorities must let the community know about the felon in their midst; and, most controversial, that the state be allowed to look up repeat offenders after they have served their sentences if they are thought to still pose a threat. Such pre-emptive imprisonment, which civil libertarians say is grossly unconstitutional, is being challenged in court. The legal system that treated Dodd far too gently until way too late now struggles to make amends. Unless the predator law is overturned, sex offenders in Washington will be either watched, or jailed, forever. It is ironic that for Dodd, who fought hard for the right to be hanged, that would be the worst possible punishment. The prospect of what amounts to a glamorous public suicide was vastly more appealing than a life alone in a cell the size of a parking space, crushed by boredom, without the least chance of freedom. For him, perhaps justice would have been better served by denying him his death wish and letting him wait, for a very long time, for death to come to him.

TIME, January 1993

Text 3.3 The rise of the cyber-stalker

These days men don’t need to hang around their exes’ homes to torment them- all they need to do is log on. Julie Bindel on an old crime in new clothing.

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