14 Mar 2010, Posted by admin in Headlines,Thoughts,Vincent, 1 Comment. Tagged anecdotal, deeper meaning, Thoughts, Vincent

Criminal Mentality

Shot by Vincent

There are currently 2.3 million citizens in the American prison system – more than the population of Paris. America also leads the world in the ratio of people incarcerated per capita, beating such authoritarian regimes as China and Russia.

The criminal mentality/ability is a peculiar one, there is tendency to brand all convicts as intellectually inferior, drug-crazed villains who operate in the dead of night to inflict ill upon the law abiding. But this is never the whole story. David Silver, a man convicted of multiple home invasions and robberies, but no murders is currently serving 521 years in jail and 11 life sentences. In his own words… ‘some of the things that thrill others, won’t thrill him’ and what thrills him clearly does not thrill the rest of us. What is more striking it seems is that this isn’t really a clear cut case of twisted criminal mentality or a chemical imbalance but more of a man who has been in and out of prison the majority of his life. Crucially, unlike a high percentage of criminals he was not committing crimes to feed a drug habit. Having first been sent to a youth correctional facility at 11 years old he stayed there until the age of 20 and then fell back in to mainstream prison at 22; it seems life behind bars is all he was really knew. Limited career choices coupled with a resourceful mentality seemed to have help push David along a tumultuous road. We are not condoning his actions simply trying to grapple with how just one man can accrue a monumental amount of time to serve behind bars.

The story of the Unabomber is a surreal one.

Dr Theodore John Kaczynski was by all accounts an intellectual child prodigy, earning an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a PhD in mathematics. He became an assistant professor at Berkeley at the tender age of just 25 but resigned two years later. He chose to cut himself of from the world and live in a remote cabin in the wilderness, where he learnt survival techniques and went a little loco. He wrote a 35,000 word manifesto on the lost morality of society and what must be done to ignite social change. He began a letter-bombing campaign that killed 3 people, and injured 23.

It’s quite clear that Kaczynski had a couple of screws loose but his background rebukes the natural tendency we hold that all bombers and murders are intellectually dumb. We present his manifesto here to inform and not to glamorise his crimes. However you spin it, he is a criminal and we are not suggesting otherwise, but one can’t help but think that there may be some rationale behind his ideas.