Does Crime Produce Criminals?

"The act of educating a psychopath will only produce an educated psychopath."

Following my best friend's footsteps and passion, and armed with ample free time on my hands, I've spent the last fortnight reading. While I've always been a bookworm, and thumb my way through a decent amount of books I've devoured some gritty, sensationalised and guilty pleasure crime books to ironically, occupy my mind.

Reading all of these crime and murder stories ranging across a few centuries, I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe that so many criminals believe they have any chance of walking away innocent. It seems these (often) crimes of passion, the killer has already resigned themselves to being locked away, though it is the small price to pay for the torture and often death to their chosen victims that they have fantasised about.

These books argue that while the act of murder is a state of temporary insanity, many killers are not always psychopathic but sadistic, drowned in a deep anger or indifferent. The murders they chose to commit they have often carefully planned, and when the fantasy of torture no longer suffices do they bring their dreams to life, and then to death. For many criminals, every moment of torture, rape and murder is performed while completely sane and aware of the harm they are causing. The legal and moral implications may be nestled within their minds but their motives have merely clouded their conscience rather than rid them of their sanity.

My greatest intrigue with the idea of psychopaths is the notion that it could be anyone, as random and unbelievable as the people who become victims are. The tragedy of victims is that often you're so invested or trustworthy of a person that their sociopathic antics will go undetected, or you could never conceive there to be anything life threatening about your relations. The signs of their inner torment may be noticed, but not noted as irregular. Only when crimes are committed and we reflect on a criminal's past behaviour do the signs become glaringly obvious.

Opportunistic criminals find themselves upon a situation in which they predict a gain or a thrill. All criminals seem to depict someone who is either vulnerable or in a vulnerable situation and strike.

Murderers, rapists and people who are fueled by the torture of others may or may not be psychopaths, but all have discarded morals so helplessly that they do not deserve to be a part of this world. The deep hatred those who have suffered at the hand of torture should not be reciprocated by projecting their pain in the form of malicious acts to negate the past.

Pehaps those who have suffered should take their pain, anger and depression and let it be the pillars to their strength and resilliance for their future in this world, rather than join the beaten.