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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this story a thousand times. Someone is abused in some manner, becomes an abuser, and the cycle repeats.

I struggle with reconciling these cases because there's two drastically different perspectives you can look at it from:

1. Brevik is a mass murderer and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

2. Brevik is a victim who was never given a fair shot at life to begin with. He was moulded into the horrible person he became.

What is the point of transition where we stop treating someone like a victim and begin treating them like a criminal? How many serious offenders have been raised in such a damaging way that you could argue they're not exactly responsible for any of the awful things they ended up doing?

It brings doubt to how we handle serious criminals in modern times.

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One Dunedin Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunedin_Multidisciplinary_Heal... result shows that a "disadvantaged" childhood combined with a certain set of genes leads strongly to anti-social adults (well, men). The same genes with a good childhood tends to result in entrepreneurs.

This result really hit home for me, because I was removed from a badly dysfunctional mother when I was ten, and now run my own startup.

It seems to me that as a society, we should be a lot more focused on raising our young - failing them incurs the direct cost of their crimes and a lost opportunity cost of the businesses they might have developed.

It's a bit similar with ADHD. You either end up with artists, or couch potatoes.

I'm not a fan of punitive jail sentences for exactly this reason, and I feel like the purpose of prison should be two fold:

1) Primarily to remove dangerous or disruptive individuals from society for as long as they continue to pose a danger.

2) Rehabilate and educate people who became criminals due to a poor upbringing or lack of opportunity, and to move people into medical or psychiatric treatment when relevant.

I don't think punishment vengeance or deterrence should be considered at all. Obviously certain people are going to be irredeemable and should be kept in prison for the rest of their lives. But it shouldn't be because they 'deserve' it for whatever reason, but because they're likely to go back to crime on release. I think certain white collar criminals should be as likely to serve long sentences as people who commit armed robbery, depending on their motivation and background, etc.

Rehabilitation and sequestration are ways to protect and help people after a crime has been committed and presumably after the victim has suffered.

Punishment for deterrence--if it actually deters--can do something else entirely, it can prevent the suffering of the innocent and prevent new criminality by increasing the suffering of the guilty.

That's a good point. The more we learn about psychology, the more we realize a lot of criminal behavior is based on a chemical problem that is usually treatable. Adam Lanza comes to mind. What he did was probably the most horrible thing I've heard of, but the illness that caused him to do it was treatable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/before-newtown-s...

The prison system in the US is supposed to be to rehabilitative rather than punitive. We aren't punishing people, we are fixing them. At least that's how it was described in the 80s. Based on sentencing in the last 30 years, that's hard to believe anymore.

Google "Jeanette maples". My wife took the call from the EMTs. Later on her dispatch department was told all about it by the detectives that worked the case.

The really really awful crap isn't public knowledge. This is one case where the death penalty is very much appropriate.

> What is the point of transition where we stop treating someone like a victim and begin treating them like a criminal?

A possible answer: proportional response. Breivik dealt out much more damage than he ever sustained. If a child has his ice cream taken by another child, and goes on to crush his ice cream bandit's larynx and watch them slowly suffocate and die, I no longer care about the ice cream. Breivik is a monster of the highest order who watched and prolonged his destruction. "Being a victim" is, in cases like this, irrelevant.

At least in terms of how we view people like him, and how we handle similar criminals.

Certainly, and analyses like these always ignore the fact that there are absolutely people (a majority?) who had horrifying childhoods and who don't end up mass murderers because of it. The truth is twofold: these people are absolutely responsible for their actions (as anyone should be, I personally think 18 is too high) but we can at the same time recognize that society's worst (and Breivik is undoubtedly in that category) do not necessarily choose to become the worst, and that the psychological conditions that make it seem like it's ok to kill people are not entirely within their control.

Incidents like these are a public health issue like any other: they point to broader deficits in societal attitudes towards medicine. Specifically in these cases it is the extreme stigmatization of mental illness in much of the Western world (for lack of a better term and not to say that it's nonexistent outside the West, just that I don't know) that makes it difficult for people to receive the care they want and need.

In most countries personality disorders are not regarded as mental illnesses.

Personality disorders have an early onset and have life-long patterns. Psychological and medical treatments are rarely effective. There is line somewhere between what people are and medical condition. When stress response or something goes awry in the young age, it may be impossible to reverse it or treat it. It's what person is.

Same person can be both victim and criminal. Criminals typically have impulse control problems and punishment don't work as effective deterrent.

This is why criminology and criminal justice systems in Nordic countries puts less weight on punishment. Separating criminals, partial rehabilitation or wearing them out in the system is best that criminal system can do. What people 'deserve' is just revenge seeking and vulgar attitude. It's probably rooted to religious belief in a soul.

Personality disorders are mostly diagnoses for life, sure, but some people do manage to grow out of them often through stuff like CBT/DBT. Even when they don't grow out, properly identifying personality disorders is immensely important and the treatment gap makes this far more difficult than it should be.

Does it really matter that much? Even if you were to say he's not responsible, you can't let him out on the streets.

One of the goals of the justice system is to protect society from criminals by removing them from it, temporarily or permanently.

I think the sentence may effectively be the same. But it's critically important not to mislabel people.

Agree, but justice systems are different:

Some countries (like ex-USSR) also practice _punishing_ for a crime in prison -- further humiliating and abusing convicted person. Don't know if there's a reason (if ever were), but some people argue that it helps to reduce future crimes by other people ("don't do that, or you'll get to prison, you know what they do there"). Can't tell if it's supported by statistics.

In other countries, like Norway, justice systems are the other way around -- besides removing criminals from society, they also bear a job to re-socializing criminals -- treating them humane and helping them to find a job after the prison.

These other responsibilities affect answer to your question.

Well, it also depends on how you want to treat him once you remove him from society too. If you want to state that he is just "full of pure evil," then maybe you just want to treat him really poorly.

> Does it really matter that much?

Yes. Not every person "damaged" in this manner gets a life sentence, having committed lesser but still serious crimes. How we treat them in prison and afterwards matters, and an understanding of the causes helps.

Punitive, harsh incarceration likely creates/exacerbates a bunch of damaged people with little hope of a future afterwards.

Agree that you can't let him out on the streets. However, protection needn't just be reactive. On the basis that prevention is better than cure is better than amputation, wouldn't it be great if we did a bunch more multi-disciplinary research into the why's and wherefore's and used that to inform everything from in-vitro genetic screening, child rearing, education, health policy, policing and judicial responses?

Personally, I believe there are too many interests at play that are quite happy not to have their methods questioned, and "preventing the next psychopath" has an element of the Y2K problem, in that, if successful, all you get is "Was that really necessary? Are you sure you didn't overstate the problem? Did we really need to spend all that money?"

It doesn't absolve them of their crimes. It doesn't throw anything into doubt. You can throw in some therapy if you'd like, but these are unfixable people who've done terrible things. They shouldn't ever step onto a street again.

Then what's the line between criminal and insane? In my opinion it's just a fuzzy line decided upon in a very flawed manner.

Unfixable is a strong term and I think a concept that represents a lot of the core issues in our justice system today.

The justice system should be in pursuit of a healthier society. Throwing intelligent, capable human beings into a cage and removing them from the economy is costly in many ways.

And even if full rehabilitation cannot be achieved, surely there are partial solutions at hand.

I don't think you can class the likes of Breivik with common criminals or run-of-the-mill manslaughter/hot-blooded murderers, or even professional killers. Breivik is a self-professed enemy of society, he sees foreign armies all around him which he is entitled to fight with lethal force. There is no solution for that but to keep him away from anything and anyone. This is not even punishment, this is simple protection of the species. Even if there were a cure effective 99.99% of the times, society simply cannot afford the 0.01% risk.

By all means treat him as best as you can, but he just can't be released in society anymore. The best you can hope from him is that he becomes a great monk.

Some people are actually unfixable and destined to commit horrific acts of violence, this we know unequivocally.

The only way we can prevent it is by screening and monitoring people before it happens, and we've got a pretty good idea of the precursors for this kind of thing.

I doubt society would consent to such interference in order to prevent a few deaths from these rare individuals.

Additionally for true prevention we would need to stop certain people from having and raising kids, now... that's a can of worms I am not sure will ever be opened.

How was any of this determined?

What if we discover a tumor in his brain that caused this and after removing it he will be a perfectly sound and reasonable person? Should we keep him in forever? What about death penalty?

these are unfixable people

You can't undo the awful things they did, but I try to avoid language constructs like 'these are unfixable people' in favor of 'we don't know how to deal with this.'

One one level I find Ander Brievik appalling because he was willing to murder a bunch of innocent people to uphold the nazi ideology which finally gave him a sense of identity and direction. While he must have had a gaping void at his center in order to go to such lengths, it's not so surprising that a badly alienated person clings to a radical ideology that offers them the social and emotional validation they crave, even at a far remove.

On the other hand I'm similarly disturbed at the people who originate and promote ideologies of this kind and who target their arguments precisely at such psychologically vulnerable types, in the knowledge and expectation that their ideas will be acted on by others. Brievik's manifesto, for example, heavily plagiarizes a monograph on political correctness by William Lind, co-founder (with the late Paul Weyrich) of the ultra-libertarian Free Congress Foundation. Lind is an influential military theorist who has done a lot to shape the debate on modern counterinsurgency; also a self-described 'neo-Victorian' and not-so-secret proponent of genocidal policies. But he hasn't shot anyone in person, so that apparently makes it OK.

I'm very much anti-censorship and in favor of maximizing personal freedom of expression, but this inevitably leads quandaries like how one should respond to an ideology that argues for the elimination of other peoples' political rights or even existence. Traditionally for liberals 'the solution to bad speech is more speech,' but this notion is predicated on the assumption that rational discourse is the norm and that fair competition obtains in a 'marketplace of ideas.' Increasingly I don't think that either is true that we have run into the limits of the market as social arbitration mechanism because it's apparent that you can attract people to authoritarian politics almost as easily as you can attract people to any other kind of brand.

I'm not sure how you systematize this; I don't really agree with Germany's approach of heavily censoring any expression of nazism in public discourse but I can see why they adopted it. For me the rule of thumb is that I won't give the time of day to any ideology that purports to sort people by their personal characteristics rather than by their behavioral ones or employs fallacies to achieve the same ends (eg 'members of (group) did these bad things, people with (characteristics) are members of (group), therefore said people are bad). Now on the individual level you can employ forensic debate to pick apart someone's specious argument and force them to a position where they either affirm or abandon that ideological identity. But on a collective level that's not really practical and what frequently ensues is a race for the lowest common denominator of political discourse, to the point that point that crackpot outfits are now treated like credible sources in debates on the news.

The internet has disrupted the media business in no uncertain terms, but it's highly questionable whether the public is actually better informed as a result. There's a lot more data available, and for news junkies like myself that's like an endless supply of free heroin, but our political discourse looks less and less like a creative exchange of ideas and more and more like an elaborate trading card game.

The point of transition is always the same... control. If we could change the things that were wrong with such people, and then it was a choice for them to be so changed or remain as they are (and in jail)... that's how you transition from one way of life to another.

Unfortunately right now we don't have that kind of ability; the best you have is the educated guess of some doctors or parole officers. We're stuck because on one hand we understand that this guy was sick, but on the other hand he's sick in a way we can't fix, and he's dangerous. If it were a physical ailment with the same qualities, we'd still feel a combination of pity and revulsion.

This is also now well supported science. The ACE study (http://acestudy.org) revealed that children who have adverse experiences in their early life dominate social dysfunction and even after one significant adverse experience have dramatically different life outcomes from other people. Allowing children to be abused is a major social problem that costs all of us terribly.

You leave out the critical question: how do we best protect society? The cycle of abuse, and circumstances that explain how abusers become abusers, does not absolve us from the necessity of protecting potential victims. It does, however, forces us to treat inmates humanely and to not engage into pure 'retaliation'. There's little evidence that punitive sentences actually do anything for preventing crimes. You can acknowledge the dangerousness of specific individuals and the necessity of preventing (further) crimes, while understanding how they got there.

It's also critical to intervene early. By the time they're adults, or have started a criminal career, it's much more difficult for someone to change. At this point potential sentences, however 'punitive', do very little dissuasion.

It's important to not forget genetics in the role of this.

There are genes that cause anti-social behaviour, depression, alcoholism, and so on. Such people, when untreated, are quite likely to be bad parents.

Their children, will indeed show a similar pattern to the parent's, but childhood abuse/neglect would be more a symptom than an underlying cause of a terrible family history.

We know that because of twin and adoption studies.

In many of such scenarios, what predicted a messed-up psyche was not the family someone grew up with. Instead, it was either family they were born into (adoption), or a set of genes (different correlations for mono/di-zygotic twins).

If he wasn't a victim of the environment he'd be a victim of genetics.

We have compassion for someone born blind, so equally we should have compassion for someone born bad.

Or we could live in the real world, not the philosophical one.

People do bad things, no matter the reason why punish them as a deterrent to others. Rehabilitate them as much as possible.

You're presenting a false dichotomy, that someone can be treated either as a victim, or as a criminal.

My mistake if that's how I make it sound. I agree, you can be both. But in many cases we don't try them in court as both. We pick one. In this case it was decided he was sane.

Using the word "sane" isn't helpful here because it has a very narrow legal definition.

A person with a psychotic illness may well not be "insane" in the eyes of the law if they were not operating under their illness at the time of their crime.

In one case, it is a crime that happened recently and resulted in many deaths.

In another case (with the same individual) it happened way past the statute of limitations and to a single person.

Judicial systems are not really designed to handle systemic shifts (with the exception of supreme courts) and are specifically limited in where they can weigh judgement on.

For the systemic changes modern governments use legislative bodies.

'Sane' has nothing to do with criminal vs victim. It's also a myth that you get off easy if you're legally declared insane - sentences for those people are so routinely longer than regular prison sentences, that lawyers advise against pleading insanity.

In any case, if you're a defendant in criminal court, you're being tried as a criminal, whether or not you're a victim. Defendants aren't declared 'victims' and tried differently.

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