The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime - Softcover

Stone, Michael

 
9781633885325: The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1633885321 ISBN 13: 9781633885325
Verlag: G38-Prometheus, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A CHILLING FOLLOW-UP TO THE POPULAR TRUE CRIME BOOK THE ANATOMY OF EVIL

Revisiting Dr. Michael Stone's groundbreaking 22-level Gradations of Evil Scale, a hierarchy of evil behavior first introduced in the book The Anatomy of Evil, Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato, a fellow violence and serious psychopathology expert, here provide even more detail, using dozens of cases to exemplify the categories along the continuum. The New Evil also presents compelling evidence that, since a cultural tipping-point in the 1960s, certain types of violent crime have emerged that in earlier decades never or very rarely occurred.

The authors examine the biological and psychiatric factors behind serial killing, serial rape, torture, mass and spree murders, and other severe forms of violence. They persuasively argue that, in at least some cases, a collapse of moral faculties contributes to the commission of such heinous crimes, such that "evil" should be considered not only a valid area of inquiry, but, in our current cultural climate, an imperative one. They consider the effects of new technologies and sociological, cultural, and historical factors since the 1960s that may have set the stage for "the new evil." Further, they explain how personality, psychosis, and other qualities can meaningfully contribute to particular crimes, making for many different motives.

Relying on their extensive clinical experience, and examination of writings and artwork by infamous serial killers, these experts offer many insights into the logic that drives horrible criminal behavior, and they discuss the hope that in the future such violence may be prevented.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael H. Stone, MD,is professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is the author of ten books, most recently The Anatomy of Evil and over two hundred professional articles and book chapters. From 2006 to 2008, he was the host of Discovery Channel's series Most Evil and has been featured in the New York Times, Psychology Today, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Post, the London Times, the BBC, and Newsday, among many other media outlets.
    
Gary Brucato, PhD, a clinical psychologist and researcher in the areas of violence, psychosis, and other serious psychopathology, is the assistant director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation at the New York State Psychiatric Center/Columbia University Medical Center. A regular contributor to the academic literature, he is widely consulted by professionals and patients throughout the country. His research group has recently acquired a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the relationship between early psychotic symptoms, and violent thoughts and behavior.

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From Chapter One - Introduction to the Gradations of Evil Scale

Dr. Stone and I contend that the concept of evil, which is universally sensed on a basic level, and yet extremely difficult to articulate and comprehend, is worthy of serious inquiry. We have dedicated significant portions of our careers to this area, spending years evaluating, studying and sometimes even treating violent killers, rapists, child abusers, and other offenders—people whose crimes few would hesitate to call “evil”—in hospitals, prisons and other settings. Within this larger framework, Dr. Stone has made a specialty of what are known as personality disorders, characterized by inflexible, maladaptive patterns of behavior, thought and inner experience, which, as we shall see, constitute a key aspect of violent behavior. My own area of expertise, following forensic training, has been psychosis, or abnormal states of the mind in which perceptions, thoughts and emotions are impaired to the point that one loses contact with reality. In my clinical work, as well as in my research with a team of investigators, I explore the relationship between violent thoughts and behaviors, and psychotic illness, especially as the latter first emerges in adolescents and young adults.

We must begin with the basic questions of whether some individuals’ acts and core drives are more evil than others’, and, if so, how we might classify them into distinct, meaningful categories which can then be ranked by severity. In The Anatomy of Evil, Dr. Stone proposed a Gradations of Evil Scale, whereby, for the first time, we might endeavor to quantify the degree of evil associated with an individual’s violent and/or homicidal actions. By “evil,” he was not referring to spiritually sinful or societally forbidden acts, per se. What is deemed abominable by one religion or culture might be fully accepted in another. Rather, the rankings encompass the types of actions that virtually anyone, regardless of culture, faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably horrible and utterly depraved.

Using a 22-point continuum, the scale takes into account the morality of the prime motivation underpinning an individual’s crime or repeated criminal acts, ranging from the justifiable to the groundlessly cruel. It weighs, for instance, whether a homicide is driven by self-defense or feelings of helplessness in the context of abuse. It captures those who take lives due to intense, difficult to control feelings of jealousy or rage. It considers those who kill out of blind loyalty to another person or party, or who aim to eliminate anyone impeding the achievement of some selfish end. As it moves into its upper limits, the scale ranks individuals who commit murders to conceal evidence of a crime; for sport; due to loss of contact with reality; or for perverse sexual gratification. At the extreme end are those motivated by a sadistic desire to inflict prolonged, unimaginable pain upon a sequence of victims, without the slightest hint of compassion or regret, sometimes followed by killing, and sometimes not. Stated another way, the scale examines one’s degree of psychopathy—a constellation of personality traits and tendencies, such as deceit, callousness, lack of remorse, manipulation, grandiosity, glibness, and superficial charm. In addition to these often overlooked distinctions, the scale’s categories delineate actions which the average onlooker might somehow comprehend, as a fellow human being, responding with sympathy and compassion, and those which are likely to result in horror, bafflement and disgust, such as protracted torture, necrophilia, or the sexual assault or killing of children. 

Thus, Dr. Stone’s scale has real value for understanding why murderers, for instance, should not be grouped into a single category merely because they have killed. This is especially true of those we call serial killers, a topic we will discuss at some length. Serial murder is presently defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” As we shall see, this definition is problematic, in that it disregards entirely the notion of motive, such that an individual who has shot to death two homeowners during separate burglaries would be grouped alongside double murderer Ed Gein, who exhumed corpses from graveyards, and created articles of clothing and household items from their bones and skin. It also disregards the timeframe between murders, which eliminates a key distinction between serial killers, and what we call mass or spree murderers, classifications we will define later in this book. According to an earlier definition, a serial killer is one who murders three or more individuals, usually in the service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the killings occurring over more than a month and with a significant period of time between them. Here, the issue is that “abnormal psychological gratification” is vague, failing to distinguish between what specific drives one might be satisfying when one kills, such that John Wayne Gacy, the sexually sadistic torturer, rapist and murder of 33 boys and young men, might be categorized alongside Dorothea Puente, who fleeced elderly and mentally disabled guests in her boarding home of their social security checks, killing nine of them with poison. We shall see that, in fact, serial murderers can be motivated by several different psychological processes or exhibit highly distinct personality profiles. Dr. Stone’s scale helps to clarify these important disparities.

It is critical to note that the scale is isolated to crimes which occur in peacetime, as wartime can alter the justifiability of an “evil” act in an individual’s mind. For instance, a man who detonates an explosive device during a military conflict, causing untold destruction and death, may, at the close of the war, in which his actions had represented part of a larger endeavor, find that he can barely swat a fly in civilian life. Acts of terrorism are also not evaluated by the scale, as they tend to be committed by persons who view themselves as parts of religiously or philosophically motivated armies. Organized crime is excluded, as it constitutes routine business within some wider enterprise, in which one criminal syndicate is at constant “war” with various others.

Throughout our first several chapters, we will discuss each ranking in Dr. Stone’s scale, describing the key distinctions between them in detail. The 22 categories are as follows:


Killing in Self-Defense or Justifiable Homicide

1 – Justifiable homicide (killing was in self-defense, not psychopathic)


Impulsive Murders in Persons without Psychopathic Features

2 -  Jealous lovers; egocentric, immature people, committing crimes of passion

3 - Willing companions of killers; impulse-ridden, some antisocial traits 

4 - Killing in self-defense, but extremely provocative toward the victim 

5 -  Traumatized, desperate persons who kill relatives or others, yet have remorse

6 -  Impetuous, hotheaded murderers, yet without marked psychopathic traits


Persons with a Few or No Psychopathic Traits; Murders of a More Severe Type

7 -  Highly narcissistic, but not distinctly psychopathic persons—some with a psychotic core—who kill persons next to them, with jealousy as an underlying motive

8 -  Nonpsychopathic persons with smoldering rage, and who kill when the rage is ignited


Psychopathic Features Marked; Murders Show Malice Aforethought

9 - Jealous lovers with strong psychopathic...

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Verlag
G38-Prometheus
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1633885321
ISBN 13 
9781633885325
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
608
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande