I was immediately drawn to the topic of crime when the capstone project was introduced, but I struggled to pose an interdisciplinary question that was truly interesting and extended past the surface level. For one of my college application essays, I was required to design and outline a course, and after many discussions with DW, I created a course that examines the primary causes and justification of crime. However, since I only had 500 words to design the syllabus, I was unable to actually dive into the topics themselves. I decided to use this project as a way of extending this research, but I also decided to focus less on the criminal and more on the human response and its effects. This led me to hypothesize that sometimes our response to crime is actually what perpetuates these acts. I knew that it would be ineffective to only explain what humans do wrong, so I worked to provide effective alternative ways that we can respond to crime and still break this inevitable cycle. While I initially struggled to begin writing, I found it incredibly easy to write when I broke my paper into three sections, with each one discussing a different way through which we justify crime. I initially intended to write a section on how mental illness results in crime, but as I began researching, I learned that these ties are actually not direct and that a variety of factors including substance abuse are actually responsible for that notion. Overall, my capstone helped me further understand an incredibly broad topic, and I'm certain that I will use the knowledge gained to influence my own life and that of people around me.
Essay: Breaking the Inevitable Cycle of Crime
When heinous acts of crime take place, it's natural to search for some form of justification for reassurance. This typically manifests itself through investigating the criminal's mental state, childhood, social life, potential triggers, or even accepting the crime as an inevitable act of evil. While these facts have the power to ease our mental state, it's important to question if this response is doing more harm than good; Do the various religious, psychological, and societal lenses through which we respond to and justify crime actually reinforce an inevitable cycle of crime? Many religions justify crime in various ways. Buddhism believes that the suffering crime induces is a necessity that humans must experience in order to overcome materialism, Hinduism sees this suffering as karma for our sins in previous lives, and Islam holds the belief that suffering is a form of submission to Allah that works as a test of faith. Christianity similarly believes that the victims of criminal acts are being punished for their sins and that suffering helps strengthen the faith of followers, but the religion's most problematic belief is its use of "original sin" to justify crime. Original sin, also known as ancestral sin, is the belief that mankind has been in a state of sin since the fall of mankind, also known as Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden. This theory has been taken to mean that all of mankind possesses the innate urge to do bad things and disobey God. Christianity believes that mankind can cure their desire to sin through accepting God's love and forgiveness, getting baptized, and understanding that Jesus died on the cross to redeem their sins, but there are no spiritual precautions to protect oneself from the sin of others (Original Sin, 2009). Ephesians 6:12 states that "we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places," which paints evil in a supernatural light, making it seem as if it's an uncontrollable force that is out of our realm (Ephesians 6:12). The use of the word "evil" has become increasingly dangerous as the media has failed to recognize the difference between acknowledging evil and using it as a scapegoat for vicious crimes. On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas claimed the lives of 22 people. The city's mayor, Dee Margo, went on CNN to discuss the shooting the following day, saying that "It was an evil perpetrator, from outside of El Paso… We still have a lot of evil in this world. And he’s representative of that" and "he was deranged, he was evil ... pure evil, as far as I can characterize it." An additional shooting killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio later that day, to which leaders across the country responded to by emphasizing the presence of evil once again. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted, "My heart is with everyone in El Paso struck by this unspeakable evil,” and Congressman Mike Dayton of Ohio followed by saying, "This is an unbelievable amount of evil that we cannot comprehend." Even President Trump delivered remarks from the White House saying that "We are outraged and sickened by this monstrous evil, the cruelty, the hatred, the malice, the bloodshed, and the terror" (Garber). The problem with this is that many of these political deployments of “evil” have served to proclaim the innocence of the system, when in reality, it is what has allowed mass shootings to become frequent occurrences. These perpetrators are human; they do not possess supernatural forces and they are entirely in our realm. When we describe them as “evil,” we subconsciously turn them into people who commit murder because of some spiritual lapse, some severe moral flaw, rather than being ordinary people who commit crimes. This struggle surrounding rhetoric has been present throughout history. As people grappled with the Holocaust, they often characterized the Nazis as subhuman because of the severity of their acts, but in his novel Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning explains the hard truth that the Nazis were composed of ordinary men– middle-aged, working class people– who managed to kill millions of Jews during WWII (Browning). It's natural that we want to believe that we are not the same breed as criminals; it helps eliminate the fear that anyone–even our family, friends, or selves– has the potential to turn into the very criminals we hear about online or while watching the news, but in order to preserve lives, we must change our rhetoric surrounding crime. Furthermore, the use of evil in this sense is simply an extension of "thoughts and prayers," a phrase that politicians often use to respond to vicious crimes. It suggests complacency and helplessness in the face of human-made terror, and while praying for the victims is obviously a necessary action to take, Americans are often angered by the lack of change that follows these statements. In reality, these crimes are not as inevitable as the phrase suggests. As of 2012, the United States' gun homicide rate was 29.7 per 1 million people, while other advanced countries like Switzerland and Germany have gun homicide rates of 7.7 and 1.9 respectively. The reasoning behind this is not that more evil people just happen to live in the United States; it's that these countries have stricter gun regulations that control who and how many people can have guns, while the U.S. has few regulations, which leads to us having 88.8 guns per 100 people (Lopez). If politicians stopped responding to crimes with empty words and instead enacted policies, less crime would occur and we would stop viewing it as an inevitable occurrence. Furthermore, we can adjust our language by referring to these events as "mass murders" instead of "mass shootings," as murder is always a crime, while the word shooting does not automatically indicate that a crime has been committed. We should also refer to the perpetrators as "criminals" instead of "shooters" and use the word "crime" instead of "tragedy" or "act of evil" because the word "crime" places the matter in the realm of law, which can be adjusted and controlled, opposed to the realm of powerlessness that other words imply. If we successfully modify our rhetoric surrounding crime to stop justifying it through religious roots, politicians will be forced to enact change, and it will actually stop being an inevitable occurrence and the cycle will be broken. When not justifying these crimes religiously, we often turn to excusing the perpetrator's actions due to a pre-existing mental condition. It's true that some acts of crime, such as school shootings, are often accurately linked to mental illness; In his book, School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, Langman explains that school shooters typically fall under one of three psychological categories: psychopathic, psychotic, or traumatized. Psychopathic shooters are what people typically imagine when they think of a shooter; In Harry Lipton's journal, The Psychopath, he explains that psychopaths are often boastful, destructive, antagonistic, deceptive, and unable to feel empathy (Lipton). Meanwhile, psychotic shooters are extremely disconnected from reality, and often have schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder, with a combination of psychotic symptoms that include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thoughts, and severely impaired social and emotional functioning. Finally, traumatic shooters are those who grew up in chronically dysfunctional families characterized by parental substance abuse, domestic violence, physical abuse, sometimes sexual abuse, frequent relocations, and changing caregivers (Langman). While many school shooters do fall into one of Langman's two mental illness categories, it's important to make the distinction that only 18% of people with a diagnosed psychiatric disorder alone commit one act of violence in a given year. This statistic increases to 31% for people who have both a psychiatric disorder and a substance abuse disorder, which confirms the theory that substance abuse is much more of a key contributor to violent behavior than psychiatric disorders alone (Mental Illness and Violence). In addition to substance abuse, a study conducted by the University of Oxford found that people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are much more likely to commit violent acts when other factors such as shared genetic vulnerability, poverty, or an early exposure to violence overlap with these mental disorders. Studies like this prove that it's impossible to justify crime based solely off of mental disorders, because in reality, violence by people with mental illness stems from multiple overlapping factors including family history, socioeconomic factors, social stressors, and substance abuse, and not simply from mental disorders alone. Furthermore, people with mental health disorders are responsible for less than one percent of annual gun homicides, and a study based on Swedish data found that only three to five percent of crimes are committed by someone with a mental illness. It's also important to note that a vast majority of gun homicides are suicides, meaning that people with mental disorders are much more likely to hurt themselves, and not others. Something that is rarely discussed is the fact that people who suffer from severe mental disorders are actually much more likely to be the victim of criminal acts. Based on nationwide data from more than 2 million people in Denmark, researchers found that in the 10 years following a diagnosis with any psychiatric disorder, a man’s risk of being the victim of a crime that was reported to police rose by 50 percent. For women, the risk went up by 64 percent compared to women without mental illnesses. The findings of this study are also true in the United States. A study found that for every 1,000 people in the US, 12 people without mental illness are victims of crime each year, while this number jumps to 22 for people with diagnosed mental disorders (Weinstock). Despite the obvious facts, we have been unable to extinguish the same narrative that emerges after each mass shooting in the United States: "Maybe he was mentally ill." This unproven justification has become extremely problematic because instead of using suspected diagnoses as evidence that both mental health and gun reform is necessary, politicians either act as if mental disorders are inevitable or play with the idea of mental health reform without following through, and life returns to normal until the next shooting occurs. Oftentimes, psychological evaluations disprove this narrative and it's found that a variety of other factors were the source of the crime. For example, when the aforementioned shootings in Dayton and El Paso occured, President Trump responded by tweeting that, "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger. Not the gun" (Ducharme). While no official information regarding the El Paso gunman's mental health has been released, it's important to note that he did publish a racist manifesto before the shooting in which he described the attack as a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas" (McCullough). The release of this manifesto sparked a slew of responses to President Trump's tweet, including one from Elizabeth Warren, stating that "White supremacy is not a mental illness. We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Donald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies" (Warren). The same problem emerges from this justification whether or not the perpetrator is actually diagnosed with a mental disorder or if it's simply a false claim because in both cases, this justification both starts and ends the conversation. In cases where the mental illness claims are false, we are prevented from having conversations about the legitimate and preventable causes of crime including racism, white supremacy, or social factors. In cases where the perpetrator is later accurately diagnosed with a mental disorder, we are prevented from having conversations addressing the fact that while mental illness was the root cause of the crime, the vicious actions that resulted from their disorder were only made possible by our country's lack of gun regulation. In some cases, President Trump is correct that mental illness is what causes the trigger to be pulled, however his failure to understand that this trigger can only be pulled due to our lack of regulations has been and will continue to be detrimental to both our health and safety. It's undeniable that our mental healthcare industry needs reform too—it needs to be more accessible, less expensive, and better at identifying and helping potential threats—but the reality is that studies prove that people with a mental health disorder alone do not directly cause death, while guns do, making it clear that gun control is both a quicker and more comprehensive solution. Similarly to religious justification and the concept of "evil", the continuation of using mental illness to justify crime prevents us from having conversations about its true causes and enacting change, allowing an inevitable cycle of crime to continue in the United States. The final way through which we respond to crime echoes the notion that all actions are embedded in a cultural context. One of the many ways that this idea manifests itself is through the media contagion effect: the idea that all forms of media coverage of mass homicidal events such as televised coverage, radio broadcasting, and social media circulation have a culminated effect in influencing the rise of these crimes (Nacos). While they are similar, it's crucial to understand the difference between the media contagion effect and the copycat effect. In their academic journal, The Contagion Effect as it Relates to Public Mass Shootings and Suicides, doctors Lisa Pescara-Kovach and Mary-Jeanne Raleigh explain that "a copycat effect is the act carried out, whereas media contagion is analogous to a virus that led to an act" (Pescara-Kovach and Raleigh). In essence, this means that the media contagion effect is the theory that the media plants ideas in viewers' minds, while the copycat effect of media contagion is the act of trying to replicate a highly publicized and sensationalized incident. While there is not enough concrete scientific evidence to prove the existence of a media contagion effect, a study conducted by Mark Follman and Becca Andrews found evidence of the copycat effect resulting from the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The report did not publically release any details surrounding the copycat cases to prevent the perpetuation of the very effect it's reporting on, but it did release that the Columbine shooting inspired at least 74 plots or attacks across thirty states. In at least fourteen of these cases, the copycats aimed to attack on the anniversary of the shooting, in thirteen cases the individuals stated that they were attempting to exceed the death toll of Columbine, and in at least ten cases, the individuals referred to the two Columbine shooters as heroes, martyrs, idols, or God. Furthermore, in three of these cases, the perpetrators made pilgrimages to Columbine High School from other states (Follman and Andrews). Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass' book, Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities, explains that media reports about details of mass shootings directly correlates to more views and higher ratings. This is expected because as humans, we are biologically drawn to understanding the unique and unknown; while we fear violence, we are also infatuated with it and consume ourselves with popular television shows like Law and Order and Criminal Minds. The media capitalizes off of our natural curiosity by quickly releasing coveted details; within hours of the Columbine shooting, the media had released the names of the criminals, their age and grade in school, information about their families, types of weaponry, the specific location of the shooter in relation to victims, and a detailed timeline. In the weeks, months, and years following the massacre gruesome photos, quotes from victims moments before death, and even a horrifyingly detailed reenactment were released. Our interest in crimes like this one is also problematic due to the fact that we are generally more interested in the perpetrator than the victims. A study conducted by Julie Weiss and Jack Levin found that 56% of readers were willing to read past the first paragraph of a story that focused on a killer, while 52% were willing to continue reading a story that focused on a victim (Ordway). While 4% is not an extreme difference, it's alarming and seems almost unethical that we would rather know more about the perpetrator than the victim. The media responds to our desire to know more about the killer by often releasing their name and picture before those of the victims. This is increasingly dangerous because individuals who attempt to replicate crimes are often seeking fame and notoriety, so seeing other perpetrators achieve this fame inspires them to act too. An article published by the American Psychological Association explains that the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs and internet in the mid 1990s caused criminal's quest for fame to skyrocket, and that "the rate of mass shootings has escalated to an average of one every 12.5 days, and one school shooting on average every 31.6 days, compared to a pre-2000 level of about three events per year" (Media Contagion…). While it has not been scientifically proven, this evidence does suggest a causal relationship between the growing media industry and shooting averages, although we cannot accurately identify which came first; did more shootings lead to more coverage, or did more coverage lead to more shootings? Regardless of how it began, it's undeniable that we are currently in a cycle where shootings and the media directly perpetuate each other. In order to end this vicious cycle, all media outlets and users of social media must agree to no longer post in ways that seemingly honor the shooter—providing their name, faces, and manifestos—and instead focus simply on the facts and victims. Although this could affect views and ratings, media outlets will no longer be competing for the most disturbing, eye-catching details, and this would still become the new normal. When this is achieved, potential criminals will no longer be able to copy people they see on T.V. or crave the fame these criminals experience, which will drastically decrease the vicious cycle of crime. We live in a time that is highly saturated with crime, causing us to normalize heinous crimes and devalue our potential power to diffuse the situation. In reality, we all possess the power to break this cycle by stopping the actions that we have normalized: using a false impenetrable concept of evil as a scapegoat, incorrectly assuming that psychological disorders alone are the root cause of crime, and having demand for the minute details of various crimes. If we denormalize these practices, we can refocus this energy on a variety of things— identifying the authentic sources of crime, enacting gun and mental illness reform that will undoubtedly make a difference, and honoring the true victims of crime instead of drawing attention to the criminal—making this apparent inevitable cycle of crime a man made thing of the past.
Works Cited
Bhuyan, Natasha, M.D. "Don't Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings." AAFP, 18 Sept. 2019, www.aafp.org/news/blogs/freshperspectives/entry/ 20190918fp-massshootings.html. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York :HarperPerennial, 1998.
Cunningham, Paige Winfield. "The Health 202: Trump blamed mental illness for mass shootings. The reality is more complicated." The Washington Post, 6 Aug. 2019, more-complicated/5d48657e88e0fa1454f80177/. Accessed 14 May 2020. Ducharme, Jamie. "Politicians Keep Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Health Issues. Doctors Say They're Wrong." TIME, 5 Aug. 2019, time.com/5644147/ mass-shootings-mental-health/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Ferguson, Christopher J. "Media Violence Effects and Violent Crime: Good Science or Moral Panic?." Violent Crime: Clinical and Social Implications. Ed. Christopher J. Ferguson. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2010. 37-56. SAGE Knowledge. Web. 14 May. 2020, doi: 10.4135/9781483349305.n3.
Follman, Mark, and Becca Andrews. "How Columbine Spawned Dozens of Copycats." Mother Jones, 5 Oct. 2015, www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/ columbine-effect-mass-shootings-copycat-data/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Garber, Megan. "How Trump Obscures Mass Shootings with Doublespeak." The Atlantic, edited by Jeffrey Goldberg, 6 Aug. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2019/08/el-paso-dayton-mass-shootings-evil-trump/595486/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
The Holy Bible: King James Version. Iowa Falls, IA: World Bible Publishers, 2001.
Langman, Peter. Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
The author, Peter Langman, is a psychologist and expert on school shootings. In the novel, he classifies ten school shooters within a three-part typology: psychopathic, psychotic, or traumatized. These ten shooters are Evan Ramsey, Michael Carneal, Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson, Andrew Wurst, Kip Kinkel, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Jeffrey Weise, and Seung Hui Cho. He also introduces five adolescents who were hospitalized because they were at risk for committing a shooting at their school, determines what type of shooter they would be, and compares them to the ten shooters. Excerpts from this book were helpful for my capstone because of their explanation surrounding the different factors that lead to crime. While two of the classifications relate to mental health, the third one demonstrates the variety of other societal factors that can lead to crime.
Lipton, Harry R. “The Psychopath.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1931-1951), vol. 40, no. 5, 1950, pp. 584–596. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1137848. Accessed 14 May 2020.
This source was extremely helpful in explaining the key attributes of a psychopath, including being boastful, defiant, deceitful, and shameless. It also went into detail about their sleeping, eating, and other routine patterns. Finally, this source was helpful in explaining how typically psychopathic behavior alone does not directly lead to violence, but when mixed with substance abuse the effects can be deadly.
Lopez, German. "How gun control works in America, compared with 4 other rich countries." Vox, 14 Mar. 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/ 9850572/gun-control-us-japan-switzerland-uk-canada. Accessed 14 May 2020.
McCullough, Jolie. "Greg Abbott invoked mental illness after the El Paso shooting. There's been no indication that was a factor." The Texas Tribune, 8 Aug. 2019, www.texastribune.org/2019/08/08/ el-paso-shooting-greg-abbott-mental-illness/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
"'Media Contagion' Is Factor in Mass Shootings, Study Says." American Psychological Association, 4 Aug. 2016, www.apa.org/news/press/releases/ 2016/08/media-contagion. Accessed 14 May 2020.
"Mental illness and violence." Harvard Mental Health Letter, Jan. 2011. Harvard Health Publishing, www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/ mental-illness-and-violence. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Nacos, Brigitte L. “Revisiting the Contagion Hypothesis: Terrorism, News Coverage, and Copycat Attacks.” Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 3, no. 3, 2009, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26298412. Accessed 14 May 2020.
This journal explained the two varying theories of the contagion effect and used specific events including the Oklahoma bombing and Columbine shooting to defend its claim. It also discussed non-shooting cases including the D.B. Cooper case, where he hijacked a commercial airliner and threatened to detonate a bomb in his briefcase. For both shootings and cases of political terrorism, the journal cited various incidents that have resulted from the original incidents.
Ordway, Denise-Mary. "How journalists cover mass shootings: Research to consider." Journalist's Resource, 6 Aug. 2019, journalistsresource.org/ studies/society/news-media/mass-shootings-news-research/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Pescara-Kovach, Lisa, and Mary-Jeanne Raleigh. "The Contagion Effect as it Relates to Public Mass Shootings and Suicides." The Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention, vol. 5, pp. 2-11, www.alicetraining.com/wp-content/ uploads/2019/08/The-Contagion-Effect-LPescara-KovachM.J.Raleigh.pdf. Accessed 14 May 2020.
This journal was my main source for understanding the contagion effect. It defined and explained the difference between the contagion and copycat effect, and explained various events that have proven the existence of both including the multiple copycat attacks that resulted from the Columbine shooting. The journal also went into detail about the effects of the media and explained how going into too much detail about crimes can provide criminals with fame, causing others to seek that same notoriety.
Sathyanarayana Rao T S. Psychiatrist and the science of criminology: Sociological, psychological and psychiatric analysis of the dark side. Indian J Psychiatry [serial online] 2007 [cited 2020 May 15];49:3-5. Available from: http://www.indianjpsychiatry.org/text.asp?2007/49/1/3/31511
Psychiatrist Sathyanarayana explains three different ways of justifying crime in this journal, including a sociological, psychological, and psychiatric analysis. He also discusses how humans' infatuation with crime can inadvertently perpetuate it, and tries to find the line between healthy and dangerous obsession. This source was extremely helpful as a starting point that helped me begin and plan out the key points to include in my project.
Silos, Jill. "Reassessing the Language of Mass Shootings." Mass Humanities, 25 July 2019, masshumanities.org/ ph_reassessing-the-language-of-mass-shootings/. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Weinstock, Cheryl Platzman. "Risk of being a crime victim goes up with mental illness diagnosis." Reuters, 1 June 2018, www.reuters.com/article/ us-health-mentalillness-crime-victims/ risk-of-being-a-crime-victim-goes-up-with-mental-illness-diagnosis-idUSKCN1IX5W2. Accessed 14 May 2020.
Process Reflection 2
I've created a detailed outline for the written component of my draft and have decided the structure and what sources will be beneficial to incorporate. I've also spent time solidifying my thesis and intro paragraph to be certain that I will make readers interested in the topic. In the coming weeks, I will add onto my outline and eventually create a draft. An important source for my written component will also be an external source. Last week, I researched and became certain that I would like to reach out to some local forensic psychology firms such as Lauren Reba-Harrelson, Ph.D and Kevin J. Richards, Ph.D., ABPP. My plans to reach out to them have been somewhat derailed because of coronavirus, but I will try to see if a phone call or email interview would work for them. As I've continued to research this subject, it has become increasingly clear that my audience must know that these are lenses in which people view crime, but not all scientific arguments that coincide. I think that my artifact will be essential in making this clear, and I've come up with an idea for it. I think it would be interesting to pick a well known crime case and craft a view-master, which is the children's toys where you look through, click, and the photos rotate on a wheel. I would first have a slide with the facts of the case, and then have different slides showing the crime from various perspectives, causing the reader to see the crime through a religious, psychological, and societal lens. I need to look into how challenging this would be to make and alternate ideas, but I think that something along these lines would be very effective.
Process Reflection 1
Since beginning my capstone project, I've read a report by an Indian psychiatrist, T. S. Sathyanarayana Rao, titled "Psychiatrist and the science of criminology: Sociological, psychological and psychiatric analysis of the dark side." This report analyzed three different perspectives by which people view criminals, the perspectives that humans are conformists, non-conformists, or born neutral at birth and all of their behavior is learned. This third perspective has especially helped me connect my project to the literature we've been exploring and the idea of self-fashioning. I also plan on reading parts of "Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters" by Peter Langman. Internally, I plan to meet with DW because we've already had many conversations about this subject. I think that my first question to ask him would be about the idea of evil and different beliefs surrounding the idea on inherent evil. It has also been recommended to me to meet with Dr. Vieron, but I'm not certain of what I would ask him or what the purpose of meeting with him would be. I know that I would like to speak to various external sources, but I have yet to pinpoint exactly who I would like this to be. I think that a possible option is my Sunday School teacher, Julie Ward, because of not only her Christian perspective, but her knowledge surrounding a variety of religions. I also think that she would be beneficial in providing Biblical evidence for the perspective on the inherent nature of evil. I would also like to find an external source who could help me explore the psychological perspective of crime. I am considering speaking to my therapist, but I'm open to finding another source. My next questions are about confirming the perspectives I will explore, and I'd like to solidify the depth I will be going into about the religious perspective, meaning whether or not I will solely explore the idea of evil, or if I will look at all religions. I think that it would be more effective time-wise to only explore the notion of evil, but I will definitely talk to DW about this. Overall, I think that I need to solidify and acquire what I will need and get more guidance on the written and physical components of the project so that I can begin to plan mine out.
Project Narrative
Project Narrative My project will be centered around the exploration of how different groups of people view crime and how these varying perspectives can actually reinforce the cycle of crime. I would like to dive into the ways that people justify crimes too and what factors contribute to the creation of a criminal. The groups of people I will explore are religious people, specifically the Christian idea that there is inherent evil in the world, criminal profilers, which shows the psychological side of crime and criminals in general, and sociologists/the media, which will explore societal conditioning and copy cat offenses. Many of these groups play into the overall idea of self-fashioning, and the concept that no part of our identity is purely our own. In order to research this, I will need to dive into the details of each group and understand their reasoning for their beliefs, which will be internet and research-based. I also might need to consult religious texts when doing this for religious groups.
SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS: -Peter Langman He is an expert on school shootings and has done extensive research on all major school shootings. He categorizes shooters into different types and is overall very helpful when learning about the psychological side of crime.
-T. S. Sathyanarayana Rao He works for the Indian journal of psychiatry and discusses if humans are born conformists, nonconformists, or neutral
-Greenblatt He discusses self fashioning and how we are born
-Genesis/the Bible These discuss the overall notion that evil exists in the world and is inherent
-DW Interesting perspective on human nature
TIMELINE Begin by exploring Peter Langman's books (can do this over excursion too) Work on one topic at a time, so start with one perspective and then move on after that is finished Hopefully by doing that I will realize what I want my written piece and artifact to be
THE SCHOLARLY CONVERSATION Peter Langman He is an expert on school shootings and has done extensive research on all major school shootings. He categorizes shooters into different types and is overall very helpful when learning about the psychological side of crime.
INITIAL THOUGHTS I don't know if my question necessarily has an answer because I think that all perspectives encourage the cycle of crime to an extent. The religious notion that evil is inherent implies that it will always exist and it cannot be destroyed, so this shows that crime will happen forever. Meanwhile, profilers and psychologists reveal that people have mental problems that are sometimes caused, but sometimes unavoidable, and these often lead to crime. Finally, the media and society, in general, is full of copycat crimes, which shows that the cycle is endless.
Internal Subject Matter I think that DW will be most helpful in discussing the religious backing for criminals and the notion of evil. The idea that evil just simply exists is fairly confusing for me, so I think it would be very helpful to talk to someone like him who has such a wide knowledge of religion.
External Subject Matter I would like to talk to my Sunday School teacher, Julie Ward, about whether or not this notion of evil is said to exist and especially how this differentiates across various Christian religions. I know for a fact that her religion, Christian Science, doesn't believe in evil, so I would like to understand how she would combat crime religiously without accepting the idea of evil.