Richard Rhodes

Coherently to the most of his books, having as object human violence in the manifold manifestation, Richard Rhodes (journalist and writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), with this text, spreads Lonnie Athens’s[1] study results, in comparison with a hundred of violent crimes authors.

In his last text, titled The creation of dangerous violent criminals (1992), Rhodes has a vague idea of a believable and authoritative answer to a recurrent question: the reasons of human violent behaviour. For this reason, he wanders in part from manifold explanations of moral, social, genetic or neurologic nature, shown untill now.

Athens’s theory seems to consent – exactly – not only the getting over of some commonplaces (for example, the theory that guess the deep reasons of such behaviour into impulsiveness due to unconscious and predetermined reasons), but also the characterization of some fundamental stages in theme of structure of the violent personology.

The bibliographical and behaviour analysis, and the test of penitentiary papers (of the sample analized) and the high sequence of deep interview to aforesaid subject, permits Athens to isolate some common motivational elements and identify repeated formative ways towards such criminal behaviour.

It follows not only the originality of the theory, but also the important role that such discovery should load, in the field of the prevention and control of such form of crime.

The first part of the text is a Rhodes’s autobiography, so he speaks about his traumatic childhood and his violent teens. But this problematic period will reveal itself very important to permit Rhodes to understand criminal’s behaviour.

Inspired by Mead[2] and Blumer[3]’s theory, he decided to conduct in-depth interviews with several hundred violent prison inmates.

He crosses and compares subject’s case-history and documentary information (perpetrators of crimes, violences and murders), so he asserts that the peculiarity of this criminals category is the different world interpretation, compared to their neighbouring respectful of law. Violence as a decisional choice. It is not an unexpected outburst. This man consciously works-out violent action plans before to proceed to action.

His brave conclusion contradicts the other theories, prevailing at that time (for example Banay, Tanay, Lester, Wolfgang and Ferracuti), overtuning completely the conclusions. Athens affirms the interpretation that the violent actors give about the situations, during the commission of their cruel actions evolves through a common series of steps.

First of all, the perpetrator values victim’s attitude or <he takes the attitude of the other> (Herbert Mead’s through) and he attributes to it a certain meaning. So, he engages a dialogue with himself (consulting implicity the indicative characters whose he has interiorized the attitude) to decide if victim’s apparent attitude has to incite or not a violent behaviour. In case of positive answer, he incites his violence to the victim.

Rhode’s book goes on with the description of four possible interpretation of violent situations that Athens identifies.

The first type he calls <physically defensive>. A violent actor forms a physically defensive interpretation in two steps: at first interpreting the victim’s attitude in order to mean that physical attack is imminent or already in progress and then indicating to himself that he ought to respond violently and forming a violent action plan. This because the subject sees violence as the only mean of preventing another person from inflicting physical injury on him or on intimate.

The second type of interpretation is defined from the researcher as <frustrative> so suggested by resistance or by the victim’s repeated attemps of belief to corporation; so, the perpetrator’s predominant emotion in forming a frustrative interpretation is anger at the thwarting of his intentions.

Whereas the <malefic> interpretation, results from an upside-down valuation of the victim, or rather, how he offends and belittles himself, he’s wicked and so punishable only with a violent type of action. The bigger emotion in this case is hate.

At the end, exists a type also known as <frustrative-malefic> that combines the characteristics of the two previous classifications. The persistence on the frustrating resistance of the victim, bring the perpetrator to include necessarily that the victim is evil or malefic and deserving, consequently, of a violent replay.

Obviously it doesn’t mean that all makes those types of interpretation complete the furious criminal act: Athens proposes three possible interpretations. The first, also known as <fixed line of indication>, is seen as a type of tunnel vision from which the perpetrator, after he has done an initial violent interpretation of the situation, is not able to get out of it if not through an action equally savage.

The second possibility is a <restraining judgement>, an escape from tunnel vision: the violent actor “redefines the situation and on the basis of his new definition judges that he should not act violently”, letting go down the aggressive plan previously defined.

Close of, the third possible development is the <overriding judgement> that happens when an actor “momentarily considers restraining his violent plan of action or really forms a restraining judgement, but then redefines the situation and rejudges it as definitely calling for violent action”.

Briefly, Athens concludes, in the studied of violent situations, that the subjects have always considered, choosen an decided when and where act in an aggressive way behaving in the situations with fear, anger or even hate at the same level of anyone else. But the violent actors are different from those because they decided to act violently.

The key of this theory seems to be now in the decisional process, previous at the interpretation, that brings the aforesaid persons to so different conclusions.

Athens states the explanation of this development on the premise that “the people are what they are for the result of the social experiences lived during their lives” but also that “the social experiences they construct often indeed on the basis of the previous experiences so that they do is to perceive a determinate process of evolution”.

The criminologist, as supplement of his theory, states four stages of the definitive course so called of <violentization>, in other words, of such mechanism through people, in the course of their life’s experiences, can approach to the following stage of violence’s development.

The first of them, defined <brutalization> is composed by “three more elemental experiences: violent subjugation, personal horrification and violent coaching”. All three, imply that a person suffer a harsh and cruel treatment by others, and that this produces a lasting and radical impact in the course of their lives. Into detail, the <violent subjugation> occurs when some trusted or particolary important figures, belonging to one of the primary group of the subject, use the violence or constrict the subject to submit himself to their authority (for example the coercion). In the <personal horrification>, the subject does not “himself undergo violent subjugation, but witness another person undergoing it”. At the end, in the <violent coaching> is assigned to the subject the role of novice violent from a person of his primary group which generally informal and implied way will spur continusly to generate a violent conduct.

Close of the first stage, the subject (through Athens’s meaning) remains deeply shocked, disturbed and ancious of knowing the reason of this treatment; he convinces himself, progressively, of the existance of a future full of risks, and in relation with them he feels powerless and humiliated. In this stage infact defined <of the belligerency> the subject, so long brutalized, choose a solution that - even if still conditioned from the fact of committing important actions of violence only as reaction to excessive provocation - is waiting only the moment of the act. This, if it will happen, will conduct certainly the subject to a series of conflicts that will not define yet the passing to the next stage defined <of the violent act>, until the subject himself will not understand entirely the meaning of his success. The respect, the score and the celebrity that this action will have for the subject will condition the choice of this way of acting, until the passing to a violent resolution, not yet placated will determinate the definitive passing to the last of the four stages of violentization: the <virulency>.

“The subject is ready to attack people physically with the serious intention of gravely harming or killing them with minimal or less that minimal provocation on their part”. That is, he is ready to become an ultraviolent criminal.

In the third part of the volume, Rhodes does, initially, a carefull check of Athens’s thesys through the analysis of some important actors of violent crimes (for example Tyson, Smith, Harvey). Afterwards, he inquires with a stream care, the same comportamental process, during different ages and cultures, concluding unfortunately the confirm on how the violentization has always been an universal mechanism of childhood formation to the adult age, in other words a precise instrument of induction to survive inside the <malefic communities>.

This process, even if is resulted necessary to the fitting in the period of subsistence of a community prevalently malefic, seems infact to be a little functional to the habit of our society, where the violent subjects affirm themselves only as a social disadapted that give attention on act only following imperativeness of their respective phantom community. Those infact contain briefly the explanation given by Athens about the violent human behaviour and how those subject assign different and aggressive meanings to the personal experiences.

The <phantom community> very briefly is not representing the <generalized other>, or rather the behaviour of community members incorporated inside them following - meadellian conception -, but the place where the violent actors find the reasons for their answers.

A last conclusion that, examined by Rhodes in the last part of the volume, has been amply treated in the recent contributions by the criminologist having for subject the construction and the re-construction of human personology. In this assay, Athens is able to gloss his studies with the demonstration that “the violent persons arrive to the violence trough the same universal process that bring all of us to the conformism, pacifism, greatness, eccentricity or sanity”, causing the same resposability in the choices.

Rhodes’s book finishes infact with a trial of application of discoveries of the american criminologist in the habit of repression and prevention of the violent criminality. The author examins first of all the high social attention that has to be concentrated on the childhood (scholastic and teen age), because this moment is very important. During this period infact should be well-timed proposals of development, of non-violent <phantom communities> and instruments against the <violent ones> that are forming. The school should afterwards – following Rhodes’s opinion – focalize the belligerent students to collettive programs of rehabilitation skipping dangerous steps to an irreversible process.

In conclusion, the author says that “if violence is in most of cases a choice they make, and therefore their personal responsibility, our failure to protect them from having to confront such a choice is a choice we make”.

[1] American Criminologist

[2] Social psychologist

[3] Sociologist