Eshan Maitra
You are probably like, “Why Not?” Murderers are not just forces of evil. They are the evil.
But James Garbarino, psychologist at Loyola University beg the different. He has spent decades studying the minds of killers and concluded everything in his recent book “Listening to Killers: Lessons Learned from My Twenty Years as a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Cases”.
The concept and the reading itself is totally unique. It offers a different and more patient approach toward reading of their violent behavior.
In his most recent talk at the Cornell University, he summed up his statement with this one sentence, “Most of these killers are best understood as untreated, traumatized children who inhabit and control the minds, hearts, and bodies of adult men.”
Our brains get developed in our childhood according to our environment and how we are treated. Which is far more important than filling nutrient needs. Young minds get shaped, programmed and hard wired to a basic base. Later in life those same characteristics only develop and get stronger. But never change. Yes, habits die hard. Regarding this Garbarino tells, “A jury looks at them in the chair and thinks, ‘What a stone-cold killer this is,’ when in fact what they’re looking at is an untreated, traumatized child whose dissociation is how he survived. And now it comes back to haunt him.”
Garbarino highly recommends a more sympathetic approach to criminal justice and it has been gaining more noticing in the US. Just in last month, their second-largest county jail in the country, Chicago’s Cook County Jail hired hiring psychologist Nneka Jones Tapia as its new executive director. The recent study says, one-third of the jail’s inmates or prisoners suffer from mental illness. That goes from minor to severe.
Though, I still wonder how would Garbarino react if one of his close ones became victim of a brutal murder.