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Lonnie Athens has spent a lifetime listening to violent criminals, and he thinks he knows how they got that way. Athens, who earned a doctorate from Cal in 1975 and teaches criminology at Seton Hall University, claims that violent criminals have gone through a series of specific stages, usually early in their lives. Like socialization, what he calls "violentization" proceeds step by step. The process can be interrupted along the way, but once someone has completed all four steps there's virtually no turning back. What is novel--and controversial--about Athens's theory is that it rejects most conventional explanations for violence. People don't become violent criminals because they're poor or oppressed, he says, and certainly not because they're crazy. In terms of their internal world-view, what violent criminals do makes sense. Athens developed his ideas from more than 150 in-depth jailhouse interviews he has conducted with violent criminals over the last 25 years. Traditionally, sociologists interested in crime and violence have relied on statistical surveys. Athens tried this approach when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, but grew dissatisfied with strictly quantitative methods. If you want to find out what makes people violent, he wondered, why not try asking them? In his interviews, Athens discovered a regular pattern when he asked prisoners what they were thinking about and experiencing when they raped, killed, or assaulted people. To his great surprise, most said they had planned their actions, acted consciously, and felt responsible for what they had done. Athens is the subject of a 1999 book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. In it, Rhodes sets out Athens's ideas and applies them in a wide-ranging exploration of violence. For Athens, the book's publication has meant a rare moment of fame in which he can share ideas that haven't got much of a hearing up to now. "Violentization is a lived experience that occurs over a series of stages," says Athens. "Each stage is composed of its own unique, composite experiences." Athens's model has four stages, which he calls "brutalization," "belligerency," "violent performances," and "virulency." The first stage, brutalization, has three components. "You're first subjected to violent domination at the hands of others," Athens says. "Then you undergo what I call 'personal horrification,' where you watch as an intimate of yours undergoes violent subjugation. This can be more horrible, because you want to help them, but you're too scared." Finally, he says, you are coached in using violence yourself. "You're taught to pick up a rock, a gun, or a crowbar, and go for the jugular." If you finish the brutalization stage, says Athens, you enter belligerency. In this stage, you come to terms with your brutalization and resolve to take serious action against people who seek to violently dominate you. "At this point, you're sick and tired of the brutalization. You're dejected, you feel impotent, angry and bewildered," he says. "And suddenly you have an epiphany: You realize that what your 'coach' has been telling you is right. You resolve that the next time somebody messes with you, you'll go ahead and try to hurt them, bad." In the violent performance stage, you must test your new resolution. Says Athens: "When the time comes, will you actually be able to attack somebody? Not just mess around, but try to kill them? This takes more nerve than most middle-class people think." Athens says that the violent performance stage is one where violentization can be interrupted, and often is. You could suffer a major defeat, or you could have minor victories and minor defeats. "But having a major victory makes a difference; that impresses people," he says. "And you then graduate to the fourth and final stage, virulence." In the virulency stage, says Athens, "you acquire 'violent notoriety.' That ripples all through your family and school and your neighborhood--and of course it also ripples through you." You notice you're powerful now. "When you walk down the street, people wave and smile," he says. "They're afraid of you." As a result, "you not only avoid being violently dominated by other people, but now you can violently dominate others at your whim." An important aspect of Athens's theory is what he calls the "phantom community," a sort of portable, semipermanent bodyguard of past experience. He says that we all operate in the world according to the mores laid down by a phantom community. This is the collective voice of all the people who have been significant in our lives. And for violent actors, these include those people who have led them to become violent. The phantom community is part of the unconscious, but it emerges in times of personal crisis, says Athens. "When you have a crackup, it's your phantom community that's cracking," he says. "You get in a crisis, and someone is telling you to do this, somebody is telling you to do that--that's your phantom community." Violent people act violently, Athens says, because they have different phantom communities from the rest of us, and the advice they get is different. Their phantom communities interpret the attitudes and behavior of their victims as fearful, angering, or hateful, and recommend violence. "Middle-class people and intellectuals think violent people are crazy, and want to dismiss them," he says. "But those people aren't crazy. From the point of view of their phantom community, what they do is rational. Athens began the jailhouse interviews for his studies of violent criminals in 1971, at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. The 23 interviews lasted an average of four and a half hours each, during which Athens took verbatim notes. In his books, Athens recreates the criminals' monologues as realistically as he can--and they make horrific reading. One of his Wisconsin professors said the material was too repugnant to be put in a thesis. "What do you mean 'repugnant?'" countered Athens. "This is like medical school when you autopsy the corpse." Over the years, Athens extended his interviews to jails across the country. A slim 5 foot 7, he was occasionally roughed up, and says he was badly frightened the two times he had to fight off would-be rapists. "I was really scared," he says. "At one point, I considered chucking the whole study." Ironically, Athens himself could easily have wound up on the criminals' side of the desk, instead of doing the interviewing. Like many of them, he's an honor graduate of the school of hard knocks. Growing up in an impoverished Greek immigrant family in Richmond, Virginia, he was repeatedly beaten up by his father, his schoolmates, and his neighbors. While still a teenager, Athens witnessed scenes of horrific brutality, including seeing a man stab a woman to death outside the family's cafe. And he learned early on that one way to get someone to leave you alone is to slam them on the head with a brick. Athens says he went through the first two stages of violentization, but not the last two. "I was well-known for defending myself," he says, "so nobody picked me out to victimize. But I wasn't close to being the baddest person in Richmond, so I never got to the next stage, of going on the offensive." Being smart and lucky also helped Athens escape the violence-forming pattern. The combination lifted him from the mean streets of Richmond to the placid halls of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and, ultimately, UC Berkeley. A snapshot from his Berkeley days shows a grinning Athens with long hair and a tie-dyed shirt, romping with his St. Bernard. For his D. Crim. dissertation research, Athens continued his prison interviews, driving his white VW bug to Vacaville, Tracy, Santa Rita, and Corona, and spending hours in the jails there, listening. Athens's jailhouse interviews led him to publish two books, Violent Criminal Acts and Actors (1980) and The Creation of Violent Criminals (1989). But the books did not lead to much of an academic career. Athens spent years bouncing between dead-end assistant professor appointments, never earning tenure before Seton Hall hired him in 1990. Today, Athens spends the academic year teaching undergraduates at Seton Hall in New Jersey and his summers as a murder-case consultant in Richmond. With the publication of Why They Kill--and the 60 articles in major newspapers he says it has generated--Athens is enjoying a rare moment in the limelight. But he knows his views on violence may never be popular. Athens says that his theory of violentization has drawn fire from liberals and conservatives alike. "The liberals get mad at me because once I think someone is a hardened criminal--once they enter the virulency stage--they need to be punished and kept from hurting other people," he says. "Conservatives object to my theory because I don't think all criminals are alike, and I believe in selective rehabilitation if it's focused and comes early enough." Athens knows that people find his theory unsettling. "It goes against people's assumptions about the nature of the world and evil," he says, "and people find that very threatening." Athens is now working on a project he started twenty-five years ago: Discovering whether it's possible to rehabilitate people who have gone through the process of violentization. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Rodarmor is the former deputy editor of California Monthly. He is now the senior editor at L2S, which produces articles about small business for Internet web sites. He can be reached at rodarmor@pacbell.net. |
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