Study on Juvenile Psychopaths

Study on Juvenile Psychopaths

What is the "super predator"? He or she are young hypercriminals

who are committing acts of violence of unprecedented coldness and brutality.

This newest phenomena in the world of crime is perhaps the most dangerous

challenge facing society and law enforcement ever. While psychopaths are

not new, this breed of super criminal exceeds the scope of psychopathic

behavior. They are younger, more brutal, and completely unafraid of the

law. While current research on the super predator is scarce, I will

attempt to give an indication as to the reasons a child could become just

such a monster.

Violent teenage criminals are increasingly vicious. John DiIulio,

Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, says

that "The difference between the juvenile criminals of the 1950s and those

of the 1970s and early 1980s was the difference between the Sharks and the

Jets of West Side Story and the Bloods and the Crips. It is not

inconceivable that the demographic surge of the next ten years will bring

with it young criminals who make the Bloods and the Crips look tame." (10)

They are what Professor DiIulio and others call urban "super predators";

young people, often from broken homes or so-called dysfunctional families,

who commit murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and other violent acts.

These emotionally damaged young people, often are the products of sexual or

physical abuse. They live in an aimless and violent present; have no sense

of the past and no hope for the future; they commit unspeakably brutal

crimes against other people, often to gratify whatever urges or desires

drive them at the moment and their utter lack of remorse is shocking.(9)

Studies reveal that the major cause of violent crime is not

poverty but family breakdown - specifically, the absence of a father in

the household. Today, right now, one-fourth of all the children in the

United States are living in fatherless homes - this adds up to 19 million

children without fathers. Compared to children in two parent family homes,

these children will be twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as

likely to have children out of wedlock, and they stand more than three

times the chance of ending up in poverty, and almost ten times more likely

to commit violent crime and ending up in jail. (1)

The Heritage Foundation - a Conservative think tank - reported

that the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years runs directly

parallel to the rise in fatherless families. In every state in our country,

according to the Heritage foundation, the rate for juvenile crime "is

closely linked to the percentage of children raised in single-parent

families. And while it has long been thought that poverty is the primary

cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this view. Teenage

criminal behavior has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love

and affection going back to early infancy, according to the Heritage

Foundation.

A father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects on a

boy's emotional and social development. But a boy abandoned by his father

in deprived of a deep sense of personal security, In a well-functioning

family," he continued, "the very presence of the father embodies

authority" and this paternal authority "is critical to the prevention of

psychopathology and delinquency." (2)

On top of the problem of single parent homes, is the problem of

the children whose behavioral problems are linked to their mothers' crack

use during pregnancy. These children are reaching their teenage years and

this is "a potentially very aggressive population," according to Sheldon

Greenberg, director of Johns Hopkins University's Police Executive

Leadership Program. What's more, drug use has more than doubled among 12-

to 17-year-olds since 1991. "The overwhelming common factor that can be

isolated in determining whether young people will be criminal in their

behavior is moral poverty," Greenberg says. (3)

According to the recently published "Body Count: Moral Poverty . .

. and How to Win America' s War Against Crime and Drugs," a new generation

of "super-predators, " untouched by any moral inclinations, will hit

America's streets in the next decade. John DiIulio, the Brookings

Institute fellow who co-wrote the book with William Bennett and John

Walters, calls it a "multi