Path to Criminal Mind Proves Baffling

When two young carjackers last month deposited a 22-month-old child onto a roadway near Savage, Md., and dragged the mother to her death, police pulled all the pieces of the crime together quickly. Except one: Why? What motivates one human being to treat another so inhumanely? What factors deliver someone onto the fast track of crime?

These are questions asked repeatedly in the aftermath of particularly heinous or inexplicable offenses. What possessed a Washington street punk called “Little Man James” to fire a pistol nearly point-blank into the window of a car driving along I-295 one winter night, randomly murdering a suburban Virginia woman? What caused a rural Virginia construction worker to rape the toddler daughter of his best friend? What led a 17-year-old student to open fire last month, wounding six teen-agers in a hallway at his new high school in a blue-collar neighborhood of Texas?

Last year in this country, violent crimes numbered 1.9 million, a 4% jump over 1990 that further contributes to the long-term increase in such crimes despite millions of dollars spent on more police, more job training, more public-assistance programs, more prisons, harsher punishment, and the once-heralded “war on drugs.” Statistics mark a distinct and disturbing trend, but they don’t provide many answers.

Felton J. Earls expects to find the answers elsewhere--in the communities, in family life, in the schools and neighborhoods, even in utero. Offhandedly, he remarks that he grew up in New Orleans, then a docile southern town whose homicide rate in recent years has caught up with that of larger northern cities.

Earls asks the same question so many other Americans ask today: “What happened to the culture I grew up in that was relatively safe? I don’t know,” said the child psychiatrist and professor of human behavior and development at Harvard University.

Albert J. Reiss restates the pertinent question: “How do you start out with an infant and end up with a violent criminal or some other kind of criminal?” said the professor of sociology at Yale University. “It is like a puzzle, you see. There are bits and pieces out there trying to provide an answer. But it remains a very perplexing thing.”

Earls and Reiss head an ambitious and comprehensive longitudinal research project to discover the factors that lead individuals to delinquency, antisocial behavior and crime. Earls is director and Reiss co-director of the Program on Human Development and Criminal Behavior--what some believe may be the best hope in the near future for understanding why some people turn to crime, why others move on to more violent crimes, and how and when society might prevent or derail criminality.

Over the next eight years, the massive project will follow the development of more than 10,000 randomly selected children, adolescents and young adults, from prenatal months through age 32, in dozens of different communities, to identify key social, psychological and biological roots of violent and criminal behavior.

Funded by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the broad-based and forward-looking program has spent six years so far in just laying the groundwork and designing its complicated approach.

To overcome a parochial viewpoint, it has brought together a core group of eight scientists from universities and institutions across the country, their fields ranging from child psychology and pediatrics, to community organization, education and law.

To avoid the inherent flaws of research that traces subjects’ lives retrospectively to re-create criminal influences, this program will follow the lives of subjects as they develop within a range of communities.

To speed results, it will observe the equivalent of 30 years of development compressed into eight years by using five-year overlaps between adjacent age groups--a technique that has proved effective in approximating outcomes after three decades.

“I think that we could produce the kind of knowledge that will influence the way other experimenters, criminologists, criminal justice practitioners, psychiatrist and so forth think about crime,” said Earls. “And it is possible that we will amass information about risk factors that starts to have a very powerful effect on individuals as well.”