Crime and Penitence: The mind of a murderer

Humans have recognized the need for protection from as long as they have recognized the need for survival, which is to say forever. However as the human brain evolved, people realized that to be protected, they need not constrain their own movements, they can rather restrain the movements of those from whom they seek protection. So in the process of evolution, man discovered that caves provided good shelters; invented traps that kill and traps that facilitated taking prisoners. With prisoners, came the need for cages and prisons.

Prisons were effective in restricting the movements of the ones who posed a threat, however the prisoners behind the bars had a brain of the same size as we do and hence orchestrated prison breaks which exposed the lacunae in the system. Higher walls were built, however prisoners also found innovative ways of scaling them. This game of constant one upmanship led to the present form of prisons - a sort of high security detention camps. Halliburton built one such camp at Gitmo and if they felt that putting it together was a challenge, they should wait and see what a challenge it would be to take it apart. President Obama, however seems resolute in his decision to close Gitmo, in fact during his recent visit to France he has also received support from President Sarkozy, who has offered to take in one of the prisoners connected with France.

Science has progressed a long way since the caveman invented the rudimentary traps. Tranquilizers, truth serums, pepper sprays have been used as effective agents to momentarily subdue our opponents, thus providing us the window of opportunity to rein them in. The field of medicine has seen great strides being made towards the cure of several ailments and afflictions - can we for the sake of convenience consider the drive of an individual to commit a crime, as an affliction and see if the solution to having smaller prisons might come from of all the places, the field of medicine. Be it a serial killer, a rapist or a hard core terrorist, there has to be a common cause for their actions against the society. Interestingly the reason some people kill may be the same the reason some others save lives - because it makes them happy.

Every action of ours is driven by the same intent, the quest to find maximum happiness or least sadness. Like the laws of chemistry say that every system will try to attain the minimum energy, it is human tendency to perform actions that they feel will provide maximum happiness, therefore peace. This explanation however, may not apply for individuals with psychological or physiological abnormalities.

A psychological abnormality may be as simple as irrational thoughts - Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet are examples of people who's irrational thought have led to war crimes and genocides; leadership combined with irrational thoughts led to the sheer numbers of deaths these individuals are responsible for. And while these leaders may not have personally carried out murders, there are others with similar psychological conditions who kill on their own. The Boston strangler, Jack the ripper, Charles Sobhraj have all been personified in movies in their respective countries; this shows the extent of terror the citizens experienced while these serial killers were on the prowl. I am hoping that medical science unveils a solution for identifying and curing these abnormal psychological conditions in individuals, so that we see fewer megalomaniacs and serial killers and thus spend fewer tax payers' dollars in building high security prisons.

While a psychological abnormality is what drives people to plot mass murders, a physiological abnormality may be the reason people are driven to kill. Killing "In a fit of rage" is caused by elevated hormone levels and while some people are prone to occasional increase in the level of hormones, thus committing one-off offences, there are others who are prone to more frequent violent behavior due to a constantly high level of hormones. A common psychological vulnerability in individuals with physiological disorders can be successfully exploited to turn them into the perfect killing machines - that weakness is the susceptibility to being influenced. Like glass can be used to focus the rays of the sun to burn a hole in paper, effective influence can be used to turn aggressive individuals towards committing mass murders. A majority of individuals, involved in executing war crimes or militant activities would belong to this category, since display of aggression is controlled by physiological factors.

Every year millions of dollars are spend worldwide to hold persons with a history of violent behavior. The reason for holding them may be - to punish them for the crime and thus make them repent their actions, to give them time to rehabilitate, to prevent them from causing further harm to the society. However if medical science can convincingly prove that physiological disorders are akin to afflictions and can find a way to suppress the factors causing these disorders in individuals, will we see a day when hardcore criminals are merely treated for their crimes and given a chance to get back to society? In utopia, yes; in the real world, no; but looking at the pain these individuals have caused to their victims, it is unreasonable to expect that the popular sentiment in the society will be one of forgiveness. While Gitmo will slowly fade into history, we will see more walls, more bars, more shackles and more guards.