In the interviews I did not initiate discussion of either the interviewees’ crimes or their childhoods. But they often raised these topics. Many saw a strong connection between the two. It started to seem important to look more closely into their sense that their violent actions were linked to a disastrous childhood.
LF: Well, I knew it was wrong, um, but there was a lot of, I’m not sort of mitigating but, I was getting married the next day and … it’s a long story really. Whenever things are going well, I sort of always, muck ’em up, mess ’em up.
Do you want to tell me how it happened, or not?
Well, I had to go and get my suit, and there was different things we had to pay for. Girlfriend was going on about this that and the other and what we, what needed to be paid for, money, bills, and not just bills but like for this wedding and that. And I went out and I done a burglary and when I was in there I saw all these pictures, all these happy families you know, and um, smashed the place up and set fire to it.
Was that because you felt you hadn’t had a happy family?
Well I know I haven’t had a happy family. But it’s just all my life everything’s always gone wrong, it just feels, well this is just how it is. But when things are going right, I just know that things are just going to go …
The project continued to be about their morality and values, but it took on an extra dimension. How had their childhoods shaped what they cared about, and how in turn did this shaping contribute to their antisocial violence? Many described childhoods in which they were shown little love.
Why didn’t you want to be at home?
OA: Because I wasn’t loved. There was nine of us in the family and there was just my mum. My mum couldn’t give love to all of us and I was left out. Not on purpose but I felt I was and I felt unwanted but I always wanted to be with my mum because that’s where a child should be. So I was always wanting to be with her but when I was with her I wasn’t loved. So I didn’t want to be with her when I was, and when I wasn’t I did.
Sometimes their families were violent. Some of them were brought up by parents who punished them severely. Many were physically or emotionally abused. The common theme was emotional rejection.
IQ: I was brought up till I was 7 in a very violent family. Yes, where weapons were used and stuff like that … [My mother] was indifferent really, you know, it was a very volatile relationship … I remember many a time the police were called to stop her I suppose what you’d call now domestic disputes and such like that, but there was some quite extreme violence from time to time, you know. There was a knife used on one occasion, a carving knife, a tray, the old steel trays. She collared my old man with a tray and he threw cups about and stuff like that, and so what I’d do when that situation happened, I used to have two or three escape routes and use one of them a lot.
II: So one of the few occasions with my mum, and being at home with my elder brothers, I was usually punished for doing something wrong. I was never really given any encouragement or a hug for doing anything right … We wasn’t allowed to play in the garden but if he ever came home from work and we were (and, obviously, this is just me thinking that it’s me getting it in the neck all the time) but I used to be singled out, as if I was some way in charge of the football game in the yard, and it would be me that would be penalized—having to go to bed early, punitive measure of retribution. It used to instill dread fear in me.
LJ: I was abused, sexually and physically abused, constantly. And I was in hospital for eleven years with polio and they only came to see me once.
What they said about their own violence suggested two different possible links to their disastrous childhoods. One route would trace back to their childhood the creation of needs, desires, and emotional states so strong that they would overwhelm either self-interest or the moral restraints. The other would see their childhood rejection as stunting the growth of the moral restraints themselves.
Looking first at the overwhelming of self-interest and of the moral restraints, two possible causal accounts emerged. One is that they responded to childhood rejection with anger, which found expression in violence. The other is that their childhood experience left them with unmet emotional needs, which they tried to satisfy through their peer group by winning recognition for their toughness and violence. If they had managed to develop to any degree the human responses of sympathy and respect, these were not enough to protect their victims. Such moral resources as they had were overwhelmed by the strength of their anger and of their hunger for recognition.
Responses to childhood rejection may have inhibited the development of the moral restraints themselves. One response was to grow a defensive shell, which involved avoiding any feelings of sympathy for others. And how they were treated made some feel guilty. This, together with the lack of recognition, did not help them develop a good sense of their own identity and worth.
The simplest route from childhood rejection to violence goes through anger. An angry demand for attention could be expressed in childhood itself.
IQ: And so I wasn’t shown no affection, and it actually got to me because the first day I was taken to school by my mother, and then after that she actually left me to come home and that. And I couldn’t understand why all the other parents were coming and picking their kids up … Why don’t I get picked up?… that’s what I must have felt, because I used to, on one occasion I smashed all the milk bottles to draw attention from all them other people.
A similar need sometimes lay behind anger later in life, and often it was generalized beyond those who originally caused it.
Did you have a kind of anger you were getting out?
NB: Um, yeah.
Why were you angry?
Um, because I felt ignored, I felt lonely.
OA: I didn’t used to feel guilty because I had too much hate inside me to feel guilty, against anyone.
Against everyone?
Against everyone.
Even people who haven’t done anything?
Even against people who haven’t done nothing to me, yeah.
Why do you think that was?
Because they had what I wanted and I didn’t have it, so I was feeling angry because they had it.
Sometimes, in their minds, the victims of their adult violence seemed to stand in for those who had abused them.
LJ: My effects on other people must have been terrible. From my crime. I’m in for rape.
Yes.
I’ve done a lot of heavy work in groups. And the only conclusion I can come to at that time was that the guy was my brother and the woman was my mum. Because on that day I was driving up towards my parents’ place because I was going to kill them. And that’s where my head was. I was just going to wipe them out all together. I thought the anger might go away then.
Did you care in those days about hurting people, or not really?
Oh, yeah, I cared, yeah. It used to hurt me very much myself, when I had a nice relationship going and it split up. I’d curse myself all the more because it was down to me. It was never down to my partner. It was always down to me.
So you did care about other people and how they felt?
Of course I did, yeah.
But the anger sometimes just overcame that?
It did, it did, it took over. It took over, you know. It was her, she just wouldn’t leave me alone.
Your mother?
My mother, she just wouldn’t leave me alone, one way or another. And I couldn’t, like I said, I couldn’t talk to people about it. I carried it all the time.
This was sexual abuse?
Yeah, sexual abuse. Even when I wasn’t at home, when I left home and went down to London to live, she was there sometimes. I might be in a relationship and going through perhaps a difficult patch, which would be nine times out of ten down to my fault. And it would be her, you know.
She’d be in your mind?
She’d be in my head. Saying that I was rotten, I should kill myself, and I don’t deserve to live and all the rest of it and that sort of stuff.
When you—you don’t have to answer any questions if you don’t want to but—when you raped a person was that anger, or was it …
It was anger.
It was anger. Anger against your mother or anger against … ?
Yeah, anger against, it was my mother and my brother, in my head that night.
In ethics and political philosophy, there is a strand of thought that gives human needs priority over other desires. The claim is that making well-off people better off should matters less than removing the poverty of people who lack shelter, enough to eat, clean drinking water, or basic health care. The view has obvious appeal, but questions have been raised about how to draw the line between needs and other things that people want. On one account, the needs that should have priority are for those things—like food and some health care—that are necessary simply to stay alive. Others want a more generous account of human needs, including not only what’s essential to staying alive but also what’s needed for a good or flourishing life. This has appeal, but one cost may be the blurring of the line between what people need and what they just want.
Perhaps the more inclusive view of needs inevitably blurs the boundary a bit. But a childhood of violence and rejection, as seen by those who experienced it, is important here. Many in the small group interviewed had this sort of past. There was the one child in the family left out because there was not enough love to go round, the only boy never collected from school and who smashed the milk bottles, the one never given a hug but often unfairly punished, the one constantly abused physically and sexually and visited once in eleven years when in the hospital, the one who had escape routes from the family violence with the steel tray and the carving knife, and the one whose mother was in his head saying that he was rotten and that he should kill himself. It is hard to avoid the thought that there are human emotional needs as well as physical ones. For some interviewees, these needs were unmet, and this contributed to the violence. They spelled out some of the needs.
Often the rejection and humiliation generated a need for recognition and respect, a need that readily found expression in violence. Sometimes the anger would combine with this.
QA: With the anger, with how cocky I used to be, with the beer—it boiled up and boiled up and I was just like an animal. People was frightened of me and I loved that. I loved it.
Why did you love that?
I don’t know. It was stupid.
Perhaps recognition is a more basic need than respect. Respect has to do with acknowledgment of your status or worth. One of the other interviewees starts off talking about status and honor, but when I ask about respect, he corrects me and emphasizes recognition, the need to be a somebody rather than a nobody.
IQ: I mean, I, it was a big bravado thing, because I’d done a lot of armed robberies and I never got caught. So there was plenty of money about and fast cars and that, and I was living, you could say, extremely in the fast lane, very fast. And I felt people were looking up to me … [talking of when he was younger] And I had a lot of violent things done to me, like initiation into Teddy Boys meant you had to have your legs cut and things happened with knives and stuff like that … But to me that was bravado, that was like badges of honor …
You’re saying you wanted respect. Is that right?
Not so much respect, but I wanted recognition. Yeah. I suppose I felt, thinking about it, I felt I was a nobody, but being with these people, I was a somebody.
Others needed to be at the center of things rather than on the margins, and to be well known or to have a powerful reputation.
II: I burgled chemists from an early age (just under 16) for many years quite successfully. I had no qualms of who bought it, where I took it … Then, all those years ago—I felt good for being able to walk into someone’s house and the whole thing would revolve around me—two shillings for this—and it gave me a sense of identity. I was quite well known in the area.
OA: I used to go to nightclubs looking for fights, looking for people to fight to enhance my reputation. I used to go looking for people who had reputation, to take their reputation away from them and add it to mine … I didn’t used to get a lot of sleep because I was on speed, but I built up a reputation for myself. If there was a fight, come and get me.
Was that reputation enjoyable?
Yeah, it was necessary for me at the time to have that reputation.
Because [of] the lifestyle I was leading. I couldn’t afford to get trampled over.
Sometimes the need for respect merges into the need to do something that is worthwhile from the point of view of the person himself and the importance of contributing something to others.
What would you like about the life of a doctor?
NB: Um, you can help people, get respected. You’ve got a title. Hello, Dr. So and So. You feel important and people see you as, that’s a doctor, I need some help, let’s go and see Dr. Black.
Do you feel that respect is something you are a bit short of ?
Um, I, yeah. I feel as though I’m not important enough to anyone or anything, and I’m just, I think it’s because of the way my parents treated me as a child. When a child grows up thinking that they’re not allowed to count for enough, he, they go around attention seeking, which is what I did, I attention-seeked … I’d like to be a doctor, not just because of that but because, um, I’ve always liked the idea of being a nurse, surgeon, doctor, working in casualty departments. It’s helping people. It’s a good strong job to be in. It’s good pay, you meet different people, you’re helping people, and you feel as though you have achieved something at the end of the day when you go home. You know you’ve done a hard day’s work, and you’ve achieved something. You’ve helped someone out.
As well as needing to be noticed and to be looked up to, people need bonds with others. Sometimes this is just a matter of having a group that gives a sense of acceptance and belonging.
I was interested in what you said, if you haven’t been to prison, you’ve never lived …
OA: Blacks go round in groups. Most white men don’t. Most white men go with one or two mates and then don’t stick together, but Blacks do. When you’re in prison, it’s different. You stick together. You find people from your area, you go to the gym with them, you’ll eat with them, you’ll communicate with them. You’re around them all the time. There’s a bond there because you come from the same area … so you become good friends. More than that. You become—I don’t know what’s the word—but you become soul mates … I never went into the army. I always wanted to. But I suppose it’s like that.
Why did you want to be in the army?
I’ve always been … I always wanted to go in the army because I felt it was something that I wanted to do. It was a profession. It was more than that. It was like joining a gang, I suppose.
But acceptance and belonging are only part of the story. There is a need for something warmer: to be needed and wanted.
OA: By the time I get out my oldest—or my eldest—will be 18, so they can make their own decisions on what they want to do. When my kids become 18, whether they want to know me or not, it’s up to them. It’s their decision. I won’t push it on them. I would love to see them but they’re adults.
Have they kept in touch with you?
No, only the oldest. But it’s then up to them. It’s their lives. If they want to know me, that’s fine. They’ve got to live their life in their way and I don’t want to be—if they say: “Oh wow! We’ve got to go and see Dad.” I don’t want that. I want them to say, “I want to go and see my dad.”
But you would like it very much if they did?
Yes, I would. Yes, I would.
When you look back on the person you were before, what do you think you had missing?
IQ: I think the biggest thing is to be needed. Needed for myself, not for what I was. I mean I went in the pub, if I had a lot of money, people needed me. Or I thought they did, but it wasn’t the case.
Childhood rejection created needs that overwhelmed the moral restraints. But the interviews also suggested that it had stunted the growth of the moral restraints themselves. The growth of sympathy is linked to being open to others: being responsive to them and to how they feel. This can be obstructed if the response to rejection is a defensive shell against being hurt by others. Even people who have developed the capacity for sympathy can deliberately switch off sympathy for others out of resentment about rejection and other hurts.
A number of the interviewees reported having stayed behind defensive barriers because of a fear of being rejected or derided.
I’m very grateful to you for telling me such a lot about yourself, about how you think about things.
QA: Well, I couldn’t years ago, and I wouldn’t years ago. I was in a shell and I wouldn’t come out of that shell.
Why do you think you stayed in a shell?
Well I thought that, if I come out and blossomed, everybody would have thought I was being funny or something.
It is a preemptive strategy that refuses emotional closeness, rejecting other people first before they can hurt you again with more rejection.
IQ: Ridicule comes into it as well. I got a lot of ridicule when I was a kid … How it’s possible, I just don’t know, but I turned from an extremely quiet placid person, frightened person, to an extremely violent person. You know.
Was that linked to ridicule, was it escaping from ridicule?
Yeah, yeah, ’cos, when I, after I got attacked, I thought that’s it.
So really it was a kind of defense?
Oh, yeah.
Having been ridiculed, having been not loved very much?
That’s right, you build up this defensive wall and you don’t let no one or nothing into it.
Another version of the same strategy is to do things aimed at alienating people so that closeness is not offered.
II: I spent twenty-five, twenty-six years in relationships that are very shallow. I’ve moved around the country, known people for a few months. One or two of the—if they’ve developed into more of an emotional tie, I’ve usually said something or done something absurd and turned them away from me as a prelude to—well, don’t get too close because I don’t want to be hurt by you—and I’ve anticipated that by being stupid.
(The impressive thoughtfulness and self-knowledge here is one instance of a strand that recurs surprisingly often in the interviews.)
Sometimes an exception would be made to the general strategy of preemptive rejection. An offer of openness, a rare crack in the defensive wall started in childhood, could lead to a positive response going against the pessimistic expectations.
Was it a long time before you found people you did make any emotional bonds with?
IQ: Um, oh, yeah, yeah, I mean I had a lot of relationships. At one stage I had three relationships going at once. But I think that was to prove myself, prove that you know that I was wanted or needed to a degree … I’ve known a young lady, a lady, for four years here and she’s moved on now … but we struck relations up and I was quite surprised you know, how open I was with her. I mean, I’ve never discussed my offenses with anyone, especially patients and that, and as I felt the relationship was getting to grips, I sat down and said look, this is what I’ve done, you know, I’m not giving any excuses, this is how it is. And I was waiting for a rejection, and I didn’t get it. In fact, it bonded [us] even better and to the point that actually we got engaged last Christmas. You know, that’s how strong it was. And I was quite, I think, all through my life you know I’ve had a lot of rejection at home, and things, and I was expecting rejection, so what I used to do, rather than people reject me, I’d get in first.
The picture of the classical Cleckley psychopath, who has some defect that makes him unable to experience life as a normal human being does, might suggest an inborn inability to empathize with the victims of his violence. This picture does not fit the account the interviewees gave of themselves. They see themselves as having the capacity to imagine the feelings of their victims. Anger or a general resentment against other people led them in one of two directions. Either they were aware of hurting other people but simply did not care, or they avoided their own possible distress at the suffering they caused by deliberately blanking out their awareness of it.
The response of knowing but not caring was openly described.
You say you’ve changed your philosophy since coming in here.
IQ: Yeah, yeah.
What was it before?
I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. What I wanted I got, sod [damn] the consequences.
When you hated people, you probably did things against them sometimes. Did you know how they felt about it, or not?
PL: I suppose at the time I didn’t really care.
You knew but didn’t care. Is that right?
Yeah.
QA: I always honestly and truly believed no matter what I said was right—which it wasn’t. It wasn’t. I was just big-headed, didn’t listen, didn’t care. Sod him.
When you said “Sod you,” did you not care about—if you hurt some people, you didn’t care?
No, I didn’t care.
Why do you think that was?
I don’t know.
Because you do care now, don’t you?
I think it’s just being cocky. I wasn’t bothered.
But you knew they were being hurt, but you didn’t care. Was that right?
That’s right, yeah. I didn’t care about people. I used to be just born free—that’s how I used to feel. Nobody could hurt me. Nobody could touch me. But I found out I was wrong.
Sometimes, through resentment, knowing about the hurt shaded into aiming for it.
When you were doing whatever it was you did, did you know it was wrong at the time or did you not care about that?
OA: Didn’t care, didn’t care.
Did you think you were hurting anyone else?
Didn’t care. No, not at all.
But you knew that you were hurting them and didn’t care?
I knew I was, I knew I was, yeah.
And you didn’t care for what reason?
They had hurt me, so I was trying to hurt them.
Right, I understand that.
Except my hurt was extreme. I went to extremes.
The other response was to “put on blinkers.” Some of the interviewees had developed this technique to blank out horrible childhood memories and also applied it when they hurt other people.
LF: There’s loads of my childhood I’ve blanked out, I mean years and years. Um, and if I don’t want to face up to something, over a period of time, it just didn’t happen.
I think we all do that to some degree.
I think I’ve relied on it too much, or got too good at it, or … and I suppose it’s sort of, I get to a stage where I just put on blinkers, you know, I just put on blinkers … I just wade in.
When you put on blinkers, it’s not thinking about the results, or …
Yeah.
When you’re doing that, do you remember it’s been a disaster previously, or not?
No, I don’t think about it. It’s always afterwards when I sit back objectively and I look back.
Another key moral restraint is respect for other people. Respect is recognition of a person’s status or standing.
One kind of respect is esteem: to respect Seamus Heaney as a poet is to think highly of what he wrote. Another version is recognition of someone’s status in a hierarchy, a respect linked to politeness and sometimes to deference. Soldiers express the deference version by saluting an officer. But esteem and deference are not the central moral restraints. Morality often calls for respect for people we neither esteem nor defer to.
There are displays of less forced and more equal versions of respect. We recognize someone as a person we know by greeting them in the street. With people we do not know, conventional politeness signals recognition of their standing as human beings. We recognize people’s legal or moral rights by not assaulting them, not stealing from them, respecting their privacy, not humiliating them, and so on.1
Both conventional politeness and respect for rights can express a deeper attitude. Children, used to the way they themselves bulk large in their own lives, can be struck suddenly with a vivid awareness that all other people, just as much as themselves, have a life to lead and a point of view of their own. The concerns of another person are as desperately important to them as mine are to me. The thought is a platitude, but its dawning can be an important part of growing up. The view of other people guided by this awareness can be called “the deep attitude of respect.”
At moments the same awareness can be vivid to adults. In the Putney Debates in 1647, Colonel Rainsborough argued for government only by consent: “For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.” And George Orwell, expressing his revulsion at having experienced an execution, spoke of “the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” He expressed the horror of walking along with the condemned man: “He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.”
Some interviewees had respect for people high in the social hierarchy. (“Because it’s the Queen’s property … It’s the way I was brought up, respect the Crown, respect the uniform, respect the royal family.”) Some had the respect shown in politeness. (“I don’t swear in front of females … I’m respectful. I mean I believe in opening doors, and if a female is walking along, be it a patient or member of staff, I let them go through the door first.”) And respect for rights was prominent in their moral landscape. (“Disabled people have rights just like normal people … I respect their basic rights.”) Occasionally the reasons given for respecting rights showed awareness of the perspective of those whose rights were violated. But respect for rights was more often rule-governed than rooted in awareness of others’ perspectives.
What was mainly missing was the deep attitude of respect. For George Orwell, execution meant one world less and this made for the unspeakable wrongness of cutting off a life in full tide. The absence of any of this is part of the shallowness of some of the interviewees’ thoughts on capital punishment. (“I just look at England. There’s no spaces, there’s prisoners everywhere, there’s criminals hanging around and that, and I reckon that if there was execution then, more execution than normal, I think it’d be a more quieter world to live in.”)
Rejection can make people hungry for recognition and respect. It can also prevent them from developing the recognition of the inner lives of others that grounds the deep attitude of respect. It is plausible to see all this as being reciprocally based. People learn the deep attitude of respect for others partly through being respected themselves. It may need some reciprocity for its emergence.
At an early stage of the project Dr. Gwen Adshead and I were discussing the people—many were her patients—we were about to interview. Thinking about their capacity to harm others, I wondered whether other people and their inner lives seemed fully real to them. She thought my doubt might be right, but said, “Sometimes they aren’t very real to themselves.” I was intrigued by this but not sure what it meant. One possible link between a diminished sense of the reality of other people and a diminished sense of one’s own reality could come from childhood rejection. “Other people not seeming fully real to them” can describe a lack of recognition of others’ moral status. And “not being very real to themselves” could describe another consequence of rejection: the failure to develop a robust sense of their own identity and worth—the failure that creates such hunger for recognition and respect.
One feature in “Factor One” of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is a “grandiose sense of self-worth.” Some of those I interviewed seemed to want to give the impression of being really somebody. But behind this often seemed to be the need to be a somebody. And the phrase “not very real to themselves” often seemed to resonate with things they said.
Do you have a picture of the sort of life you want to lead when you are out?
LF: I’ve never had a normal comfortable time when everything’s solid all around me, the people are solid all around me, just that, just simple, you know what I mean?
What do you mean “people are solid”?
Er, my family let me down, all let me down … This is just one example. I came off [drugs] and I hadn’t had none for about six months, then my mum, it’s a strange relationship, ’cos at the end of the day she’s “Mum,” y’know what I mean, all that sort of thing, and then she says, “You done really well, I think you deserve a treat,” and then … I just can’t, I know it’s not right. So it just confuses, confusing. And that’s how it’s been for a long time.
Here, someone solid can be relied on, trusted not to let you down. Perhaps feeling this solidity in other people is part of developing a sense of your own solidity and worth.
Most people, without using the phrase, have a sense of their own moral identity. They have a picture of the sort of person they are and some rough idea of the sort of person they would like to be. For the very lucky or the very self-satisfied, the two overlap quite a lot. For most of us there are gaps.
Not every aspect of what we are like contributes to the sense of moral identity. Our age, height, hobbies, and preferences for some kinds of food, sports, or music are usually less relevant than our picture of how far we are honest, generous, law-abiding, brave, kind, a good parent, or a good friend. The same goes for the sort of person we would like to be. Some ideas about that (being a good swimmer or having a less chaotic desk) may have little moral import. Only hopes or wishes charged with deeper values are part of the sense of moral identity.
Moral restraints include these value-charged pictures of how we are or what we would like to be. Here ideas of the sort of person we do not want to be are important. “I am not the sort of person who takes bribes.” “I do not want to be a disloyal friend.”
Identity and agency are linked. What we are and what we do are interwoven. We are all shaped partly by things outside our control. The kind of person we are depends on genes, parenting, the culture we grow up in, and many other factors we ourselves did not choose. But many people also play a part in shaping the kind of person they are. This self-creation takes different forms.
There is the mainly unconscious kind of self-creation Aristotle noticed. We freely choose to act in a certain way, and these actions shape our habits; in turn these habits harden into our character. Then there are choices that, usually unintentionally, shape us by influencing the personal world in which we live. These include choices of whom to marry or live with, choices of what job to do and where to live, choices about having children, and many more minor ones.
And there is conscious self-creation. Many people do this with minor goals: aiming to change what they are like by losing weight, by their choice of clothes or hairstyle, by assertiveness training courses or by reading books about how to make friends and influence people. A few have more major, consciously self-creative projects that may engage them for years or a lifetime: finding self-understanding through psychoanalysis, becoming an Olympic athlete, becoming a good Christian or Muslim.
The value–charged pictures of ourselves, as we are and as we might become, obviously influence the more conscious kind of self-creation. But they also influence the other kinds, by encouraging or discouraging some actions that may shape habits and then character, or by guiding our choices of friends, partners, or jobs. If we lack such pictures, we have less power of self-creation and lose a central part of being in charge of our own lives. How far did the men I interviewed have these pictures?
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space.
—W. H. Auden, In Praise of Limestone
Some answers to the questions about the sort of person they would like to be were shallow, concerned only with what skills, talents, or job they would like.
Do you think most people have an idea of the sort of person they want to be? One of the things … people say is “I don’t want to be the sort of person who does that kind of thing.”
ZC: In some cases, I sort of like talented people. I’ll give you an example—Bruce Forsyth. Such a great entertainer, you know. He can play the piano. He can do all kinds of things. I wish I was like him, talented.
Do you have a picture of the sort of person you are? Do you have an idea of either what you are like or what you would like to be like?
JF: I know what I would like to be like.
What would you like to be like?
I’d like to be a gangster.
Would you? Why would you like to be a gangster?
I would. I would like to be like the Kray twins.
Would you? What’s good about that?
I dunno. I just would. The Kray twins—back in the sixties, the Kray twins used to stop all mugging and rapes on the street and kept the streets clean … they got to know celebrities and things like that. And they gave the money to charity.
Do you have a picture of the sort of person you’d like to be?
CQ : I’d like to be myself, er, working in restaurants, train to be a chef, that’s what I would like to be … Or work for the Council or road works, do digging up road pavements … things like that, you know.
The shallowness is partly mentioning only jobs and not more value-charged personal characteristics. There is also the impression of little thinking behind the choice of ideal jobs. The choices of being a chef or doing road works do not seem to reflect ideas about personal suitability for a type of work or the satisfaction of the job. They seem pulled at random out of a list of jobs. Or as Penney Lewis has suggested to me, they may reflect the thought that any kind of normal job is better than detention in a secure hospital. Either way, the lack of reference to a value-charged picture suggests a weak sense of moral identity.
By contrast, some interviewees gave answers suggesting that they had thought about personal development at different stages of life. One man was acutely aware that long-term incarceration had blocked his chance to develop.
Would you be willing to say something about the sort of person you think you were before, and the sort of person you think you are now, what’s in common and what’s different?
QL: Well up until my index offense that brought me into Broadmoor in 1971, I lived basically [on] one level. I’ve worked, worked hard, got a pay packet, met my mates at the end of the week, got drunk, went to pubs and clubs and sometimes indulged in some petty thievery, you know. Other times, occasionally got into a fight, drunken fight, and that cycle repeated itself every week, for years, until one day I killed somebody and wound up in Broadmoor … I’m completely bored with institutional life … One day’s the same as the next, you know, I’m fed up with everything that the institutions have to offer. I need life’s experiences outside, you know, to develop. I haven’t really been given a chance, you know … I’m 54 years old now, you know, if I was outside now, I’d tend to associate with people who are in their mid-twenties, which was the age I was locked up originally, you know … But the trouble is that people in their mid-twenties now are not the same as the people in their mid-twenties when I was in my mid-twenties. I find it hard to get on with my own age group.
Do you know why you find it hard to get on with your own age group?
Well I’ve missed out on all the development stages, you know, I mean people have, during the time I’ve been locked up, people have had these experiences, they’ve got married, they’ve had children, they’ve had mortgages, they’ve had holidays abroad, cars, money in the bank, holidays. I’ve never had any of these things, you know.
Another had thoughts about moral development at different stages of life, and his comments also suggested a fairly deep sense of moral identity that he recognized to be in conflict with his past actions.
BF: You can’t get an idea of right and wrong as a little kid. A lot of that involves, sort of, “Don’t shout at your parents,” or “You will eat all that food up before you go to bed” or something, which is a basic grounding, but … as you go through adolescence, it’s no use. You got to learn new rules.
When you say learn new rules, is it learning rules, or is it thinking about what you really care about, or what is it?
I think that, um, you see how you want to fit in. You learn to behave appropriately, to maintain that position. And, er so I think, er, the impetuousness of childhood has to give way and maybe initially then it is a question of learning rules … but that stops becoming conscious quite early. I think you become what you want to become. This is me, this is how I want to behave, this is what my conscience tells me because this is where I want to be.
Do you have a picture of how you want to be?
Um, yeah, I have ideas of how I’d like to be in society and how I’d like to respond to people. I mean my own self. Er, I think at times my, er. I’ve been ignorant, I didn’t react with a conscience as it were and, I’d like to undo that really and behave as a more er, humane person all the way round really.
Some gave answers whose depth or shallowness was hard to classify.
Do you have a picture of the sort of person that you think you are? If you were to describe yourself … what would you say about yourself ?
NB: Um, the sort of person that thinks about other people before myself … I worry about other people before I worry about myself … So that tends to leave me as a, very down because I tend to use all, all, what I’ve got inside me to give to other people and leave myself with nothing. Um, er, I’m very well spoken when I want to be. Um, I use eye contact when someone’s speaking to me. Um, and I’m a pleasant, bright young person.
Yes.
I have a side to me where I don’t like bullies. I don’t like bullying people. I don’t like authority. Because, to a certain extent, um, I don’t like to be pressured … I like a lot of space round me.
This account, while drawing on the value-charged characteristics relevant to moral identity, also has hints of shallowness. There is such a strong sense of being a self-sacrificing altruist that one wonders how much critical thought is behind it. There is a hint of randomness in the comments about eye contact, being pleasant and being well-spoken. Some sense of moral identity is expressed, but in ways that raise doubts about the speaker’s self-awareness.
Are there any clues about why the sense of moral identity sometimes fails to develop or develops only in stunted form? Where does a shallow sense of self come from? Some of the interview replies have suggested that being shown respect matters for developing a robust sense of your own identity. But being denied respect is not the only thing that holds it back. Being made to feel guilty, to feel bad about yourself, can also play a part. Some of the interviewees had experienced a lot of guilt.
What sort of things were you made to feel guilty about?
II: Well—excuse me—masturbating and things.
So you were made to feel guilty about that?
Very much so.
Sometimes even as victims they were made to feel guilty.
LJ: I hated myself for the things my mother did to me and stepbrother. Um, I thought it was all my fault. That I was the one that was doing the wrong.
Being made to hate yourself is hardly a good basis for developing a sense of moral identity. This load of childhood guilt also raises a question about the “lack of guilt” in the Cleckley picture of the psychopath and in the Factor One list of personality traits in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Does this overload of guilt in childhood deaden the capacity to feel guilt later in life? Or is the adult absence of guilt more apparent than real?
Some felt bad enough about themselves to feel accused even for things they have not done.
Do you ever feel guilty about things?
NB: I do, all the time, yeah.
Really?
Um, if someone kicks in a locker in the dining room or someone writes something on the walls, and because no one knows … who done it, I sit there feeling guilty, thinking I hope they’re not all looking at me.
The interviewees gave very different accounts of whether they had felt guilty when they had committed their crimes. Some did fit the Cleckley-Hare picture of being guilt-free. But they gave different reasons for this. Some felt that their crimes were victimless and therefore they did not feel bad about what they had done. They suggested they would have felt guilty if they had harmed someone.
Do you ever feel guilty about something you have done?
NB: Um, [hesitation] No, no.
You wouldn’t feel guilty about it? You wouldn’t feel bad about having done something?
I suppose I don’t feel guilty because I’ve never committed a crime where I’ve literally affected someone, like I’ve broken into someone’s house and stolen everything … Because I’ve stolen from an office block … it’s not actually affecting anyone, it’s just because it doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s not stressing anyone out.
Others said that any guilt was overwhelmed by the hatred they felt.
Some people think that the way your conscience tells you something is wrong is that you feel bad about it. But other people think that what you feel guilty about is just a matter of the way you were brought up.
OA: Yeah, I think it’s true on both accounts. It depends on the way you were brought up, what you were brought up for … hmm … it’s … yeah … I mean, I didn’t used to feel guilty because I had too much hate inside me to feel guilty, against everyone.
Others said they felt a lot of guilt later, through having to confront the hurt they had caused, but at the time had avoided guilt by putting on blinkers.
OA: I mean if you don’t know the person, d’you know what I mean, you justify it, well you don’t justify it, you don’t see them.
Yes.
I mean I remember when I hurt this bloke in prison and his Mum was in court and she was crying and that, I felt, it was horrible, I felt so terrible. ’Cos she was there and I could see what she was doing. But, um, it’s like a blinker thing, you don’t look.
When you acted you were, as you put it, blinkered, you didn’t think about the consequences for people?
But kids when they first start doing that, like if they break in somewhere and nick … they should face the people, ’cos there is nothing worse than being shamed right up to someone’s face. I mean no one likes that, it’s horrible.
Some said they had felt guilty at the time but had not admitted it.
QA: In the case of actually murder, I would agree with hanging. I have killed twice—two people, and I never forget it. I didn’t only hurt them. I hurt their family mentally, not physically but mentally, and their loved ones. I took them away from their families and everything … I felt guilty but I wouldn’t admit it. I was too proud. I used to go away and say: “I was out of order there” to myself but I wouldn’t say it to anyone else, but now I do.
One interviewee expressed strong feelings of guilt now, but said he had not felt guilty at the time. On his account, at the time he was full of conflict. Although he denied having felt guilt, he said he had tried to stop and had felt disgusted with himself.
LJ: Then the act of rape is violent enough, for Christ’s sake, you know. But even when I was doing that I stopped suddenly, you know. What the, what I’m doing here? What’s going on? You know. I tried to make feeble apologies to the woman, stupid ridiculous apologies to the woman, you know. And I drove up to one of the motorway stations and parked in front of a police car, which was sat there. And that was it. I was just totally disgusted with myself. I didn’t get a damn thing out of it. I mean, sexually, it didn’t do anything for me at all. Thank God. But now, I think to myself, well you know, I mean I’ve tried to, all I can hope for is that, the woman, well the woman’s not still agonizing about it. Hopefully, she’s been able to get on with her life and put it to one side. Obviously, she’ll never forget it … I mean it’s not just affected her, it’s affected her family and friends and stuff like that. These things, you don’t think about. I didn’t think about them anyway. I do now. I mean, there was times when I wished I could see her again.
Some interviewees felt they had been very much in charge of their own lives.
IQ: I always used to feel that there’s three categories of people in prison and these establishments. There’s the sad, the mad, and the bad. I also feel that you fit into one of those, and I always class myself as the bad. Not the sad, not the mad, but the bad … I mean, I chose the route I’ve took, solely myself. I mean, no one says to me, “Joe, you’ve got to do this, you got to do that.” I’ve chose it, so really my destiny as such was laid out by me. It wasn’t laid out before and said, “Right, your destiny is to end up in Broadmoor in thirty years’ time. I mean I actually walked the road that led me here. You know, no one pushed me along.
But reports of quite often not feeling in control were more frequent.
JF: Sometimes in my predicament, I know I’m doing wrong, even when I know I should be doing right. Even though I do wrong, I can’t stop it.
You knew that other people were hating whatever it was. You didn’t want to know about it. What pain were you protecting yourself from?
II: It almost happens with me anywhere—I get a psychological impression, feelings may not be right, and it’s just a helplessness. It’s a feeling that would lead to some sort of intensity, that it would push me over the edge. I wouldn’t be able to cope.
LF: I don’t, I mean I know that’s what I am supposed to, I mean I don’t necessarily do it myself, because I always tend to make loads of mistakes and mess up … I know really when I look back at these things, I know what I done was wrong, but leading up to it I don’t always make the right, I don’t even think, so, I don’t think there’s decision-making there …
And you feel you don’t know what you want?
No. I do know what I want, and I, it just doesn’t seem, er, a sort of reality. Doesn’t seem as though, you know, I can get there.
It sounds as though you want to be kind, but sometimes have a little trouble in controlling …
Yeah, I know, this is the thing, I know what I’d like to be, and know how I should act, but it all seems to just go out of the window.
It seems to me that you’ve got quite a strong sense of right and wrong, but it isn’t always easy to apply it in your life.
But putting it into practice, I’m not, I know what’s what, but I don’t, I can’t, I’m not very capable of putting it into practice.
Interviewees indicated that actions they took in haste or in a moment of rage could take someone else’s life and ruin their own.
BF: It all happens in episodes, but … although we’re in here for a reason on the whole, er its not as though … the reason took up most of our lives. Sort of, instances of a minute, five minutes, at most or something bring us here.
One reported taking decisions hastily and then acting on them much later but without any further thought intervening.
Are these very hasty decisions taken in a mood of strong emotion?
LF: Yeah, also, hasty decisions that have spanned sort of days or weeks, d’you know what I mean? It’s a hasty decision, although sometimes you expect a hasty decision to be like, two seconds later you go out and do it, you think, then you go and do it. But I can make a hasty decision about something and then sort of do it two weeks later. D’you know what I mean? Without, and not, in between thinking about …
Some of these accounts of not being fully in control have resonance outside this group—“I know I’m doing wrong even when I know I should be doing right” is an experience most of us have—but taken together the comments suggest a much stronger sense of being defeated in an internal battle: “It all seems to just go out of the window,” “doesn’t seem as though I can get there,” a helplessness that “would push me over the edge—I wouldn’t be able to cope.” A strong form of this sense of internal struggle and defeat was found in one interviewee who saw himself as having a good side and a bad side, and saw loss of control as the victory of the bad side over the good.
FV: My head—its all messed up and I got like a good side of me that’s talking to you now, and then there’s a bad side of me, and when that side comes out I don’t feel guilty or anything.
So, although there’s two sides of you, which side is the real you?
The one you’re talking to now.
Is that right? So if now you could dump your bad side, you would do so?
Yeah. Because I’m like an animal. Like I say, I attack people for nothing.
And when you’re on the other side, will you dump your good side?
It’s like a battle. When I stabbed this girl, about ten minutes before I did it I was having this big battle in my head going on and on—don’t do it, do it, do it, do it—and like that. It went on and on and in the end I did it. But after I did it, it was like a buzz, you know what I mean. “He sorted the bitch out” and stuff like that.
I see—you sorted the bitch out and it gave you a buzz. So the bad side likes that kind of buzz.
Yeah—the bad side likes violence—getting my own back and stuff like that. The good side—it just wants a normal life. But it’s like a big battle. Sometimes I lose, because I had a fight a couple of weeks ago and the bad side was taking over a lot and the nurses saw it as well.
But you don’t think the bad side is the real you, then? Where does it come from?
I don’t know.
It is all very far from successful self-creation. Some interviewees, using psychiatric help in attempting to change themselves, found it a struggle against immense odds.
AO: I know some of the thoughts I have are wrong and some of the things I’ve thought about and said and want to do are wrong. So I know that I’m thinking wrong, or doing wrong.
What makes you feel guilty about it, or what makes you know that it’s wrong?
I don’t think it’s that I feel so guilty. It’s more that—I can’t get it off my mind, for starters. Initially, obviously, it won’t go away and I can’t sleep. It makes me restless. It just plays on my mind … It worries me that eventually I will do these things and I don’t want to particularly want to—difficult for me actually to say “no” to them.
Are you having thoughts about attacking people or about sex?
They involve kidnapping, rape, and violence, and murder, so …
If you could choose not to have these thoughts …
I am trying to. That’s a choice that I’ve already made, that I’m trying.
It must be very difficult to do that.
Yeah. At the moment I’m trying chemical castration, to work on the fantasies, which will do away with the sex and the murder/violence fantasies that I have, but I ain’t having a great deal of success with it.
Sometimes an interviewee, despite the inner conflict and the terrible things done in the past, did have a sure sense of moral identity: a belief that their good side was the real person, even if in the past it had been occluded.
You say what you would like. You would like to look after your mum. You also say that you would like to have—you say, room to be me.
OA: Yeah, room to be me.
OA: (laughs) What does it mean? Believe it or not, I’m a very sensitive and loving person. I would like to be able to show somebody that I can love and look after them.
Do you think you’ve always been a very sensitive and loving person?
It’s always been there. I’ve just denied it. I’ve just hidden it, shall we say.