Why They Kill : The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Why do they kill? Why do some men and women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? No question has so stubbornly resisted explanation. Religions, ideologies and every discipline or science that touches on human behavior have offered answers—theories invoking moral, supernatural, behavioral, social, neurological or genetic causes. None of these well-known theories credibly and authoritatively explains the violent crimes you and I follow in the news every day. It strains common sense to imagine that people are born to violence when rates of violence differ from group to group, culture to culture and age to age. It strains common sense to invoke brain damage to explain violent behavior when most people with damaged brains are not violent. 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.

I have personal experience of violence, which is why it interests me. For two years, between the ages of ten and twelve, I was subjected to beatings, psychological and physical torture and near starvation at the hands of a stepmother whose amused malevolence substantiated the wicked stepmothers of folklore. When my older brother and I were removed from our abuser’s dark precincts by an enlightened juvenile court and sent to a private boys’ home to recover, I gained thirty pounds in three months. As a result of my extended personal encounter with evil, most of my books have examined human violence in one form or another, always for the purpose of discovering what causes such violence and how it might be prevented, mitigated or at least survived.

I encountered the work of Dr. Lonnie H. Athens, an American criminologist, almost by accident, scanning a catalog of books published by the University of Illinois Press.