Why They Kill Quotes

“When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Giving such violent caretakers second chances, as social workers and judges frequently do, with the best of intentions—attributing their violence to poverty or racial prejudice and propping them up with counseling, household helpers and other resources—cannot reverse their violentization. To the contrary, such endorsement implicitly authorizes further violence and makes the state complicit with the violators.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Violent actors act violently not because they are mentally ill or come from violent subcultures or are brain damaged or have low self-esteem but because they have different phantom communities from the rest of us. That difference is the reason they attach different, violent meanings to their social experiences.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Such a choice—to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do—is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Preventing and limiting violence means protecting children from brutalization in a country where physically punishing children continues to be acceptable behavior.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Not testosterone per se but the patriarchal preference for subjecting males to violentization, and their physical advantage in achieving early successful violent performances, explains why men are much more likely than women to be seriously violent.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“people are more likely to refrain from violence out of preference for a nonviolent existence than they are to do so out of fear of punishment.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“The character damage of a trauma survivor,” he concludes, “can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim’s inner life.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury, and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity—and not from any success in being God.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Lonnie Athens demonstrates to the contrary that violent people come to their violence by the same universal processes of soliloquy and dramatic self-change that carry the rest of us to conformity, pacifism, greatness, eccentricity or sainthood—and bear equal responsibility for their choices.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Less obviously, the resurgence of capital punishment in modern America exposes the insecurity of U.S. authorities with the increase in violent crime, which challenges government monopoly of violence.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“Once violence is understood to be a behavior, not a pathology, the fact that it was responsive to social pressures no longer seems mysterious.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“it is possible to argue that some people are violent and mentally ill, but it is no longer defensible to argue that people are violent because they are mentally ill.”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

“(From personal experience as well as professional study, Athens strongly rejects linking community malignancy with race. Violentization has nothing to do with race—or with poverty, for that matter.)”
― Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist