Study of Hyperactive Boys Who Become Felons : Clue to Nipping Bad Seed in the Bud

Some doctor friends of mine assure me that we’ve all been putting too much emphasis on the environment . . . that there are bad seeds--just plain bad from the beginning.

--Reginald Tasker in 1954 Broadway hit “The Bad Seed” In a small Encino laboratory crammed with computer screens and diagnostic electronic equipment, Dr. James H. Satterfield contemplates streams of herky-jerky lines on a long roll of paper as he seeks the hiding place of the bad seed.

He is studying the brain waves of a towheaded little boy in a small room next door whose head is strapped in a cap that sprouts a crest of wires feeding information to Satterfield’s instruments.

Satterfield’s federally funded research is aimed at identifying those hyperactive boys, 6 to 12 years old, whose neurophysiological disorder makes them statistically more likely to become violent criminals and devising treatments for them before they wind up in prison.

He thinks he is making progress.

Speciality for 15 Years

Satterfield is executive director of the National Center for Hyperactive Children, a nonprofit clinic and research institution. Hyperactivity is a specialty he has been working in for 15 years. Other researchers in the field said Satterfield is highly respected and a leader in research.

Following up his earlier research, which reported that 46% of young boys diagnosed as hyperactive had been jailed on felony charges by the time they were in their late teens, Satterfield this month published in an international scientific journal his first tentative findings that there may be identifiable differences between the brain functions of hyperactive boys who became criminals and those who did not.

His research now looks toward determining whether the tentative differences, found in electroencephalograph readings of the small electrical currents of the brain, can be confirmed in a larger number of test subjects.

If so, he hopes to refine the technique into a reliable method of identifying boys who may have a predisposition to violent criminality.

That does not mean, he stressed, that he is developing “some sort of method that will invariably stamp a kid with ‘you’re doomed to be a criminal.’ ”

“One of the reasons we’re interested in this new technique as a diagnostic aid is that early identification is important because the sooner we can begin treating the child, the more likely we are to be successful.”

Statistical ‘Risks’

Children with such behavioral disorders can be classed in groups with known statistical “risks” of becoming criminals later on, he said. “If a child is diagnosed as hyperactive, the probability of his being arrested for a felony in his teens is 10 to 20 times that of a non-hyperactive child. . . . Maybe half of them are going to be in trouble with the law.”

The existence of hyperactives, children whose minds appear to operate differently from normal children’s, has been accepted in psychiatry for many years. But the causes of the difference, one goal of Satterfield’s research, have long been a subject of debate.

It is a touchy subject, the search for a true “bad seed” undreamed of when Maxwell Anderson’s play of that name and the movie that followed were hits in the mid-1950s. The play, taken from a novel by William March, told the story of a murderous little girl born with no capability of developing a conscience. She turns out to be the granddaughter of a multiple murderer.

Satterfield is not suggesting that the children he treats inherited their problem from criminal ancestors.

But he does say he is dealing with a condition that is probably present from birth or even earlier.

“Some mothers report that the child was far more active in the womb than their other children, kicking and striking much harder and more frequently,” said Breena Satterfield, a psychotherapist and director of the clinic that treats children at her husband’s center.

Children with the hyperactivity condition--also called attention deficit disorder, minimal brain dysfunction or hyperkinetic syndrome--are not just healthily energetic or mischievous. They are a bundle of trouble from infancy and do not respond to discipline by parents or teachers.

About 5% of children are believed to have the disorder, James Satterfield said, although estimates have ranged from 3% to 15%, or loosely speaking “one in every classroom.”

It is mostly a male problem. There are six to nine boys with the disorder for every girl, he said. Troublesome as the girls may be, he said, the boys are more violent and likelier to grow strong enough to become dangerous at an early age.

“Most likely these kids are born with a constitutional predisposition to impulsive conduct, a short attention span and excessive motor activity,” he said.

Excessive Motor Activity

By excessive motor activity, he means seemingly perpetual motion that leads some parents described by Breena Satterfield to build cages over an infant’s crib, lock doors and erect fences around the house in a sometimes futile attempt to keep an insistent toddler from running away.

“In a sense, they start out life in prison,” she said.

She told of one mother who put up a six-foot fence around her house. Her son, though barely old enough to walk, got out anyway.

A police officer who found the child blocks away returned him and told the mother she would be cited for child neglect. In tears, she protested, pointing out that she had taken every precaution she could think of and had surrounded the house “with the tallest fence the law would allow,” Breena Satterfield said.

“While they were still in the street arguing, a second police car drove up with the same boy, who had been found wandering in the next block,” she said. “He had gotten out of the first police car while the officer was talking to his mother and escaped again.”

For parents, “trying to raise one of these boys can be just a living hell,” she said.

When such a boy first goes to school, he enters a world he cannot cope with, James Satterfield said.

‘He Can’t Do It’

“You put him in a classroom with normal children and tell him to sit still, pay attention and behave. He can’t do it. It’s not possible for him to do it.

“He’s always up running around, talking out of turn, pushing and shoving other kids. He gets a reputation as a bad kid. The teacher is always on his back.”

He ignores discipline, James Satterfield said, and “socially he doesn’t learn well because he can’t learn from experience. He hits his best friend in the face with a baseball bat. When that kid doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore, he doesn’t understand, and the next day he hits some other kid in the face with a baseball bat.

“He becomes a loner because other kids think he’s weird, and they learn that hanging around with him gets them in trouble. Pretty soon, he thinks of himself as a bad kid.

“Someone’s always accusing him of something, so he starts lying, saying he didn’t do it. Pretty soon he’s lying about everything, and then he starts stealing and the whole thing snowballs.”

How far and fast the snowball goes is reflected in the criminal records of some of James Satterfield’s research subjects, classified as hyperactive when they were younger.

One subject’s record began at 14 with an arrest for car theft. By the time he was 17, he had been arrested 10 times on charges including carrying concealed weapons, robbery, car theft and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon.

Another subject was first taken into custody at age 9 for running away from home and had been arrested 12 times before he was 14 on charges including burglary and robbery. He was in prison by 20, serving a four-year term for assault and six counts of burglary.

Based on a statistical analysis he made, James Satterfield estimated that as many as 64% of the boys committed to the California Youth Authority in 1980 would have been classified as hyperactive children--including 89% of those who were jailed for crimes of violence.

“When I tried out that figure on the CYA officials, they said they had no hard data, but they wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

The most surprising finding in one of his earlier research projects, which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1982, was that hyperactive boys from different socioeconomic classes and with a wide range of IQs were liable to get into trouble with the law in their teens at about the same rate.

That set hyperactive boys into a class in which the accepted links between delinquency and low social class and IQ appeared to vanish because of the influence of hyperactivity alone, he said.

It was well established by previous studies of youths, James Satterfield said, that a larger proportion of youths with lower IQs were likely to get arrested for a serious offense than those with higher IQs. And the arrest rate for boys from lower-class homes, classified by parental income and occupation, was higher than the rate for those from the middle class, which in turn was far higher than the arrest rate for youths from the upper class.

10-Year Study

His 10-year study followed 110 Los Angeles County boys diagnosed as hyperactive between 1970 and 1972, comparing them to a control group of 88 non-hyperactive boys, chosen to match them by age, IQ and class.

Satterfield concentrated on serious crimes, including robbery, burglary, assault and kidnapping. He did not count what he classed as minor crimes, including petty theft, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana and “status crimes,” offenses that are illegal only for juveniles, such as running away from home and truancy.

The study found that hyperactive youths from any economic class or IQ level were 20 to 25 times more likely to have been arrested for a serious crime than their non-hyperactive equivalents. The arrest rates for upper-class and lower-class hyperactive boys were almost identical, between 50% and 60%.

About 25% of the hyperactives had been institutionalized for delinquency, compared to 1% of the non-hyperactives.

That set Satterfield to wondering if there were any scientifically detectable differences in childhood between hyperactives who had become delinquents and those who did not, some way to separate one group from the other while they were still young enough to concentrate preventive treatment on the high-risk group.

He and other researchers had published conclusions in the early 1970s that there was a difference between hyperactive and normal children that registered on electroencephalograms, which measure the strength of tiny electrical currents that flow naturally between cells of the brain.

EEGs Studied

Since he had taken EEGs of the 110 hyperactives in the early 1970s, when they were 6 to 12 years old, he decided to review those tests and look for differences. He was aided by a $140,345 grant from the federal government’s National Institute of Mental Health, which has funded his research since 1962.

“We had saved all this data, and so we were able to look backward and compare the bad outcome group, the delinquent group, with the non-delinquent group to see whether childhood measures would predict later-life delinquency,” he said.

“It turned out that the answer was yes. We did have a measure of brain function that in fact predicted later-life delinquency. That was quite surprising to me.”

In a study published this month in Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, an international journal for researchers in the field, Satterfield reported that “the findings suggest that there may be two distinct subgroups of hyperactive children” whose childhood EEGs “were found to be significantly different . . . while social, familial and cognitive attributes were not.”

He suggested that, if the findings are shown to be valid, it “would be useful to delinquency prevention because it is more economical to treat only those children who can reasonably be expected to become delinquent without treatment.”

A follow-up study of another 100 hyperactive boys has begun, he said. The center is offering free evaluations of possibly hyperactive 6-year-old boys who live with both biological parents.

In the EEG tests, small sensors on the scalp detect the current, measured in microvolts, or millionths of a volt. Readings from 20 sites on the head register as jagged parallel lines on a long sheet of paper.

The readings are taken while the boys watch TV cartoons and are subjected to stimuli that register in the brain--bright or dim lights or clicks from nearby speakers. The boys are asked either to ignore the distraction or react to it. The EEG picks up the brain’s response to the stimuli.

A powerful new tool for understanding the EEG data has been provided by a computer program that translates the microvolt readings into an image of the brain on a TV screen, using different colors to represent different readings, Satterfield said.

“If you can create a picture to look at, you can see relationships you otherwise couldn’t see,” said Satterfield, who earned an electrical engineering degree before becoming a physician, followed by a residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in neurology. He was an associate professor of psychiatry from 1970 to 1982 at the UCLA Medical School, where Breena Satterfield is a visiting lecturer in psychology.

Clinic’s Treatment

The center’s clinic has developed a treatment for hyperactive children, she said, that stresses psychiatric and psychological therapy and counseling for the child and sometimes for other family members as well, along with the drugs commonly prescribed to calm hyperactive children.

“The drug can mask symptoms so that the kid is less of a nuisance, but he hasn’t learned anything,” she said. “The drug can make you sit still, but it can’t teach you to inhibit your impulse when the drug wears off.”

James Satterfield said he refuses to write prescriptions for the drugs unless other measures are also taken because drugs alone “may do more harm than good.”

“It may make the child less of a nuisance to the parent,” he said, “but it prevents the parent from seeking help for other underlying problems. . . . You’re implying that’s an adequate treatment and the parent then will not look further for additional treatment.”

A follow-up study found the clinic’s treatment method reduced the percentage of teen-age boys jailed for a serious crime, he said. While 25% of boys treated with drugs alone wound up institutionalized, he said, the figure for boys treated with the clinic’s method was 11%, although still far greater than the 1% figure for the non-hyperactive control group.

While 36% of the group treated at the clinic were arrested at least once for a felony, the figure for the group treated with drugs alone was 46%.

He suspects that the cause of hyperactivity is chronic and cannot be cured, although it may disappear around age 35 to 40. But he hopes that the encouraging results of the clinic’s treatment show that, with help, “the child learns to compensate for it, to override it.”

“The $64 question is if you give kids a lot of combined treatment in childhood, does that carry over into long-term better adjustment in adulthood?” he asked. “The preliminary information we have, as reflected in the arrest record, is that the answer is ‘yes.’

“But we still would like to know whether they become productive citizens, whether they can earn a living.”

For the those who wind up behind bars, imprisonment is the wrong remedy and it comes too late to do any good, Satterfield said, calling for more emphasis on research and treatment of hyperactive children.

“If society wants to do something effective about reducing crime, we have to begin to put some effort into prevention, so that members of this high-risk group don’t wind up with a criminal record in adolescence, and then we wonder what to do with them.”