Tammer in Philly wrote:
You're conflating multiple issues, which leads to some cloudiness in how to approach it.
Sociopathy is a mental illness. Mass murderers, serial killers, many rapists, etc. tend to be sociopaths. There is something wrong with those people that may or may not be fixable, depending on how the issue is identified and how they are treated. There is an element of nature vs. nurture, i.e. some people may be prone to sociopathy but may never actually commit violent crime, much like some people are more prone to alcholism or addiction to other drugs or gambling, but are able to either control themselves or to abstain altogether. We generally don't understand the basis for such illnesses very well (physical, genetic, or epigenetic), and we have only a weak understanding of the "nurture" or environmental differences that drives some of these people over the edge, while others like them never cross that line. Being abused as a child, growing up with an alcoholic parent, etc. are things that may trigger a sociopath or an addict to act out later on. The same person in a different environment may have the same proclivities, but never act on them.
That's very different from the majority of crimes, things like armed robberies or burglaries or muggings or kids engaging in drug-related turf battles or money disputes. Those are all crimes of expediency, generally committed by people who aren't stupid and who are trying to achieve a specific end.
The latter group is the type who may be helped by better education, who may be deterred by draconian punishments (though there is plenty of evidence that this is of limited effectiveness), who are almost certainly criminals by nurture rather than by nature. In other words, they are situational criminals, and while they know right from wrong, they can justify that they are doing what they need to do to get by. Or they're just assholes and don't care, and it's purely a matter of expediency (e.g. I want what you have, and I have the ability to take it by force or by deceit, so I will).
"Disadvantaged" kids are prone to being in the second group because they live in shitty areas with shitty schools. They lack role models. There are cultural issues that make their success difficult. You're asking if we are all where we are because of privilege. Privilege is definitely part of it, and to pretend otherwise is to wear the worst kind of blinders. Most of us were very privileged by birth, even just by having parents who cared for us and read to us. We can make progress with kids who lack good home lives by providing them with a strong school structure, role models outside the home, goals and rewards for reaching them, and basically providing the type of conditioning that good parents do themselves. (We can't keep bad parents from reproducing, so society has to pick up the slack for their kids.) Improving the home situation of kids and our societal expectations of them is one way to prevent them from landing in a place where crime seems like a valid option.
On the other hand, the sociopaths--the mentally ill who prey on people for amusement or as some sort of attention grab--they won't be deterred by draconian punishments. Most eventually kill themselves anyway. They are doing what they do because they fundamentally don't understand how to be a part of society. They are ill, by and large, and there are few common threads in terms of home life and upbringing and social class and education. In this country, the sociopathic mass murderers are overwhelmingly young white males from fairly educated and well-off homes. The CT shooter was the child of a wealthy man. Dylan Klebold had married parents, a father who worked from home and was around his son all the time, a pretty good academic record, etc. No lack of privilege drove him to crime to make ends meet. He was just a kid with no self-esteem and enough mental instability to go along with his friend Eric's idea, and Eric was a true sociopath. What those kids need aren't more severe consequences; they need some counseling and interventional therapy. "Jail really really sucks" isn't going to deter someone who is mentally incapacitated when it comes to behavior and consequences.
So, I'm typing too much. You can't reduce the number of sociopaths, but I think that good mental health screenings and treatments and research will reduce the number of sociopaths who actually turn into killers. But that's a very different problem than reducing the number of thugs who are criminals because they feel they have no better options. That last group is in theory easier to address, and they are responsible for far more deaths than the mentally ill group ... but we as a society don't care all that much (based on what we do about it), because they tend to mostly kill each other and they are mostly poor.
-tammer
I hear you but it's this kind of complexity, the attempt to understand "why" that paralyzes us. Stating the obvious, humans are complicated. Getting wrapped up in "why" so one might craft a surgical solution to violent behavior is an example of how the pursuit of a "perfect" solution can be the enemy of a "good" solution.
I don't trust simple claims like "sociopathy" is a mental illness. Sociopathic behavior is ill-defined, likewise are "illness" and "disease". We are all born sociopaths, it's the most base (pun intended) human nature. Our parents, with varying degrees of success, beat down the sociopathic behaviors with various carrots and sticks, and replace it with more socially positive behaviors.
I'm not saying that sociopathy is not a mental illness, I'm just saying that a lot of precision is lost when one no longer describes specific symptoms and starts instead to just say "sociopathy". It's easy to say the institutionalized serial murderer is a sociopath, but what about the occasional thug? What about the druggy that robs your house to feed his habit? A good debate requires clarity in the terms used.
I would argue that the people who commit that majority of crimes are also sociopaths. But how does us labeling them as such, help?
Re. plenty of evidence that draconian punishments don't deter? Really? Swift execution of public flogging or hanging wouldn't deter? There's lots of studies of punishment and deterrence, but they are all badly distorted because they study variations of the status quo. For example, the deterrence value of capital punishment when it's seldom applied, costs millions in auto-appeals, and people die of old age on death row. There's all sorts of ways that what seems to us to be a harsh or harsher punishment, to the thug isn't so. If we're going to attempt to impact the thug's value system, we have to work the issue from within his value system.
A study of rape punishment might conclude that harsher punishments don't deter if the statistics show that swift minimum mandatory sentences deter better than delayed chaotic, often longer, sentences. But one extrapolates from that at risk. Cut the guy's dick off, do it in some way that maximizes public humiliation, and see if you don't get some deterrence value.
If one creates incentives that synch with human nature, they get good results. The contrary, no matter how well intended, get lousy results. Swift, sure, draconian consequences works because it is in synch with human nature.
My point is that we should get as much out of deterrence as we can. Really make the consequences of violent crime just as awful as we can imagine. Then, after that is in place, we can work to understand the reasons behind violent crime.
Re. Better education. I'm all for teachers that push the kids hard, spank the crap out of those that don't pay attention, and kick the problem kids out of the school. But education isn't a core issue here. Kids should be getting their values from their parents. When the vice principle spanks the child, that's just some reinforcement of parental training. Schools are a place to gain knowledge and learn the social skills that come from being surrounded by peers. Thugs don't hurt people because they didn't get enough math.
Re. Disadvantaged. Sure, a lot of kids come from seriously screwed up homes. And if you accept my premise that kids are all born sociopaths, a home that fails to train that out of a kid is a certain recipe for a thug. With the best of intentions we've done a lot of harm in my lifetime on this issue. The percentages of children having children, and births out of wedlock are incredible. Most of these kids aren't going to go anywhere, they never had a fair chance. We've replaced a culture of self-sufficiency, personal responsibility and Protestant work-ethic with one of entitlement.
What we, as modern, sensitive Western culture did is try to mitigate the consequences of bad decisions and poor behavior. We campaigned to remove stigma, the community's eon old measure to help guide behavior. We also created clumsy financial support systems that screwed up the incentives for folks on the lower economic rung.
If we could really fix the issue of the screwed up home, we could do a helova lot of good. But that's tough. We've worked hard to create an entitlement society. We've worked hard to remove stigma where we could. It would take a real sea-change to reverse course. I'm not optimistic. The entitlement seekers are a very powerful voting bloc and, to the cheers of most of the media, will take us to our economic doom.
And I don't conflate. Around girls, anyhow. It's only conflation if a person prematurely gets wrapped up in the causes of a problem. Make the big fix with a machete, then pull out a scalpel to surgically deal with what remains. That's not conflation that's a "movement to contact" where the heavy force strikes fast and hard. Follow on forces then deal with the isolated resistance that remains.
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...he's pissed because it interrupted "Good Morning Vietnam".......bye, bye.......no more raccoon. 
And what do you have against Black people with guns? Huh? Little bit of racism in there? Media inspired prejudice perhaps???
