Well it’s possible for all these things to be true at the same time. I was mugged years ago by a group of high school kids - when the cops were able to track them down, they were all living in a shelter for kids in the foster system who had been unable to find a foster family, typically because of unmanageable behavior. They had often been the victims of sexual or physical abuse, and had lived on the streets.

It’s difficult to hear about that and not have some pity for those kids- yeah they got my phone, but I got to go home to my wife and kid and a high paying tech job.

At the same time, I have a distant relative who will spend the rest of his life in jail for committing a serial string of crimes without apparent remorse over many years. Family members who know him describe him as “scary” and a “psychopath” - but he was also kidnapped and abused as a child. Are those things unrelated? Are some people just evil?

I lived on Chicago’s south and west sides for years. Volunteered with youth at the Boys and Girls Club for much of that time - and did everything I could to raise money for that organization and more.

I can have sympathy for the boys who are drafted into drug work, age 11, and I can personally want the legal systems’ incentives to change while ALSO understanding that some people will choose to be rotten nearly every time. I’m not making an argument for the “carceral state” or one in support of the US’ present prison system. Just making clear my observation that far from everyone is a “victim” of the system and acting like they are hurts the real victims on both sides.

I suspect that almost all antisocial behavior, along with mental health and drug addiction issues, are in some way related to childhood trauma. Many people are able to heal enough that they don’t go down the really bad roads, but many more are not.

As a society we give parents wide latitude in how they raise their kids. And I suspect most people don’t even realize how their parenting decisions might affect their kids down the line.

> are in some way related to childhood trauma

I think that view has the risk of being damaging. In particular parents or partners are often misattributed as the “cause”.

1: It leads to victimisation, where people blame their environment rather than fix themselves. We all can find traumatic childhood incidents if we look for them (“repressed” memories can fill in if you didn’t actually have anything obviously traumatic happen).

2: If you suspect trauma and then wonder “what did the parents do”, that is rather unpleasant for the majority of loving parents that didn’t abuse their children whatsoever. All parents make honest mistakes, and any good parent has plenty of unexpunged guilt, usually for no good reason. Also we can be traumatised for entirely mundane events in our lives - where nobody is actually to blame for evil, yet we often look for blame in others.

3: we can’t change our past, so acceptance of what happened is important. Whether we see ourselves as helpless victims or capable actors is critical I think. Creatinig a narrative of victims is unhealthy, in my experience. One of the worst abuses I have seen, was professionals getting a bunch of troubled teenagers together, letting them talk about their trauma together, and then sending them home. Normalising abuse, and it was extremely damaging to the sensitive, empathetic teens in the group.

4: There are great parents that end up with fucked-up kids, for reasons beyond their control.

I am concentrating on parents here, because although the people I know with your attitude might say they think about the wider picture, often the first thought I see from them is assuming the parents caused the problem - judgy people are very damaging IMHO. I am definitely not accusing you - but I am accusing others I see with an similar attitude. Disclaimer: not a parent, just old enough to have had the opportunity to learn a little, and trying to be wise enough to know how innocently we can all make mistakes.

It doesn't matter.

We should take steps to prevent it, and the discussions are useful, but once someone is provably willing and capable of committing violent offenses, they have forfeited most forms of sympathy.

> Are some people just evil?

Probably it is part genetic and part environmental, just like most other human traits.

By the way, the fact that many criminals were abused in childhood has many possible explanations, and it is not obvious which one of them is correct. For example:

* Maybe child abuse causes people to become criminals.

* Maybe there is much more child abuse than we imagine, so a majority of criminals was abused, but also a majority of non-criminals was abused.

* Psychopathy is heritable, which means that most psychopaths also had a psychopath parent, and that is why they were abused.

What reason did the cops give you for not doing anything? Was this in SF?

I was told there was no appetite to prosecute a robbery on a white male. They said the guys would be right back on the street within hours if they tried to pick them up.

Rule of law de facto doesn't exist in other words