Killers: Born or Made?

In today’s society, we are surrounded by violence in the media. Everything from video games to children’s cartoons contains violent images that could be having an effect on our youth. A popular question psychologists and researchers ask is, “Are criminals born, or made?” I believe that social structure shapes human behavior; and this behavior may turn out to be criminal. It is not a reasonable assumption to say that every person who exposes themselves to violent images is going to turn into a killer, but because our youth is impressionable at that age, they are more prone to immolate what they see on television.

Since Darwin’s time, people have been trying to explain why people commit crimes. Researchers believed that DNA and chemical imbalances at birth caused criminal behavior. For example, in the early 1960s, a researcher discovered that men who had a chromosome pattern of “XYY” were much more common in prisons than in the general populations. These men were called “super-males” and were characterized as excessively aggressive, hostile and more prone to unexpected behavior. The most notorious of these hypothetical “super-males” was Richard Speck, the crazy killer of eight nurses in Chicago in 1966. It was believed that Speck possessed an extra “Y” chromosome. Years later, it was discovered that Speck did not have the pattern and the “XYY” theory eventually fell into disrepute almost as fast as it became popular.

Another psychologist, Cesare Lombroso, became convinced that a criminal was an immoral person, a sort of throwback to primitive man who had not developed to the same biological level as the modern, non-criminal man. Lombroso called this inferior being the “born criminal”, a being who was pre-destined for criminal behavior due to his physical configuration. According to Lombroso, the “born criminal” descended from a “degenerate family with frequent cases of insanity, deafness, syphilis, epilepsy and alcoholism among its members.” However, Lombroso’s theories began to unravel when several weaknesses were discovered in his research. Virtually all of Lombroso’s presumptions were based on studies performed only on convicted criminals. He did not use a control group to which he could compare his results. Therefore, his conclusions could not be broadened to include the general population as a whole.

Since most all research saying killers are born has been discredited, the only liable explanation is that killers are created through society and what people are exposed to. Examples of this include the Columbine shooting, whose criminal behavior was linked back to movies and video games the killers watched. The students went on a rampage on April 20, 1999, the 110th anniversary of Adolph Hitler’s birth, in Littleton, Colorado, at the Columbine High School. Wearing long, black trench-coats, the students walked through the hallways shooting at students aimlessly. They shot 38 classmates, killing 13 before they turned the guns on themselves. The event was an almost exact replica of a scene in a popular youth film of the time in which angry students in long, dark coats killed their teachers with shotguns.

Bartol, Crut R. Criminal Behavior. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 1991
Siegel, Larry J. (1998) Criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.