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What is the "super predator"? They are young hyper criminals who are committing acts of violence of unprecedented coldness and brutality. This newest phenomenon 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 behaviour. 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 have become increasingly vicious. John Diiulio, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, says, The difference between the juvenile criminals of the 1950 s and those of the 1970 s and early 1980 s 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. " (Bennett, Diiulio, & Walters, 1996, p. 17). 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. 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, one-fourth of all the children in North America live in fatherless homes. This adds up to 19 million children without fathers. In comparison to children who live in two parent 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 prison.
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 the United States, according to the Heritage Foundation, the rate for juvenile crime is closely linked to the percentage of children raised in single-parent families. While it has long been thought that poverty is the primary cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this view. Juvenile criminal behaviour has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love and affection going back to early infancy. A father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects on the child's emotional and social development. A young boy abandoned by his father is deprived of a deep sense of personal security.
In a well-functioning family the presence of the father embodies authority and paternal authority is critical to the prevention of psychopathology and delinquency. In addition to the problem of single parent homes, is the problem of the children whose behavioural problems are linked to their mothers' drug use during pregnancy. Children reaching their teenage years could result in a potentially aggressive population. 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 behaviour is moral poverty." (Worship, James-Blakely, and Stephen, 1997, p 24) 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 "multivariate phenomenon, " meaning that child abuse, the high number of available high-tech guns, alcoholism and many other factors feed the problem.
University of Pennsylvania professor Main Wolfgang says, " 6 percent to 7 percent of the boys in an age group will be chronic offenders, meaning they are arrested five or more times before the age of 18. " If that holds true, because there will be 500, 000 more boys ages 14 to 17 in the year 2000 than there were in 1995, there will be at least 30, 000 more youth criminals on the streets. Between 1990 and 2010, there will be 4. 5 million more boys, yielding 270, 000 young criminals. "The big destruction happens early, " Heritage Foundation fellow Pat Fagan says. "By the age of 4 or 5, the kid is really warped. Psychologists can predict by the age of 6 who " ll be the super-predators. " According to Fagan: Child abuse and alcohol ruin these children. But the groundwork was laid three decades ago with the widespread adoption of birth control, which made the sexual revolution possible.
It altered people's dedication to their children and altered a fundamental orientation of society. Sexual morality got unanchored in the 1960 s, followed by the legalization of abortion. "Abortion is a very definite rejection of the child. So are out-of- wedlock births, as well as divorce. The [predators] everyone's afraid of were abused kids. There's sexual abuse and alcohol, and just the general decline in the cultural knowledge of what love is. In 1950, for every 100 children born, 12 had divorced parents or were born out of wedlock.
In 1992, that number had quadrupled to 60 children for every 100 born. Throw abortion into the mix, and the number shoots up to 92 per 100. (Did, 1996, p. 31) John Diiulio asserts that "each generation of crime-prone boys has been about three times as dangerous as the one before it. " And, he argues the downhill slide into utter moral bankruptcy is about to speed up because each generation of youth criminals is growing up in more extreme conditions of "moral poverty" than the one before it. Mr. Diiulio defines moral poverty as "growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings. " The "super-predator", as told to a Washington press gathering by Diiulio, is a breed of criminal so dangerous that even the older inmates working their way through life sentences complain that their youthful counterparts are out of control. He cites a growing body of scientific evidence from a variety of academic disciplines that indicates that churches ameliorate or cure many severe socio-economic ills. "Let [the liberal elite] argue church-state issues... all the way to the next funeral of an innocent kid caught in the crossfire, " he says. "Our guiding principle should be, 'Build churches, not jails' -- or we will reap the whirlwind of our own moral bankruptcy. " (Paul, 1996, p. 27) Diiulio's "super predators" are born of abject "moral poverty, " which he defines as: The poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong.
It is the poverty of being without parents, guardians, relatives, friends, teachers, coaches, clergy and others who habituate you to feel joy at others' joy, pain at others' pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong. It is the poverty of growing up in the virtual absence of people who teach these lessons by their own everyday example, and who insist that you follow suit and behave accordingly. In the extreme, it is the poverty of growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in chaotic, dysfunctional, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings where drug abuse and child abuse are twins, and self-respecting young men literally aspire to get away with murder. Scholars who study drugs and crime are only now beginning to realize the social consequences of raising so many children in abject moral poverty. The need to rebuild and resurrect the civil society (families, churches, community groups) of high-crime, drug-plagued urban neighbourhoods is not an intellectual or research hypothesis that requires testing.
It's a moral and social imperative that requires doing - and doing now. (Bennett, et al, 1996, p. 22). It can be assumed that the "super predator" is actually a young psychopath or psychotic. While these terms have become largely interchangeable, thanks in large part to Hollywood, there are distinct differences between the psychopath, the psychotic, and the Super Predator. British Columbia Psychologist Robert Hare has done some ground breaking research into the study of psychopaths and has found that psychopaths tend to under utilize regions of the brain that integrate memories and emotions. These findings helped support long held theories that the destructive nature of psychopaths was neurobiological in nature.
Aside from the neurobiological aspects of psychopathic behaviour: The psychopath knows right from wrong; they are quite often charming, glib and impulsive individuals. They often brag about grandiose life ambitions, but often lack the skills or the discipline to achieve their goals. Psychopaths are easily bored and crave immediate gratification. It has been found that psychopaths, quite often, have very high intelligence quotients. When caught in a lie, the psychopath will shift blame, or switch topics with no apparent embarrassment. They do not form deep or meaningful relationships, and often end up hurting people who get close to them.
While they are intellectually aware of society's rules, they feel no guilt when they break them. (Kaihla, 1996) While many of the aspects described above fit the profile of the "Super Predator", there are some important differences. The "super predator is almost completely without ambition, they are often of below average intelligence, and they do not recognize -intellectually or otherwise- any rules of society. While psychopaths and the "super-predator" both share the inability to feel emotion, the psychopath can feign it to achieve a result, the "super predator" seems completely incapable of even that. More interestingly, the "super predator" is remarkably candid. They will more often than not, admit not only to their crimes, but also as to the why, and as to the fact that they did nothing wrong and would do it again.
Psychopathy does not always manifest itself in criminality. In fact, a psychopath could be a highly functioning and highly successful individual in society. In contrast, the "super predator" lacks the intelligence or the "masking capabilities" of the psychopath to achieve success outside of the criminal world. (Bennett et al, 1996, p. 29) The "super predator" is not psychotic. Psychotics are largely out of touch with reality.
They suffer from delusions, hallucinations, or other disordered states. They are often found not guilty of crimes they commit by reason of insanity. (Kahlia, 1996). Today, especially in the inner cities, children between 5 to 9 years of age are often left to their own devices. They spend much of their time hanging out on the streets or soaking up violent television programs and violent rap music; they have easy access to guns and drugs, and can be extremely dangerous.
By the year 2005 they will be teenagers, a group that tends to be, in the view of Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, "temporal...
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