THE ROLE OF LEARNING WHEN DEFINING A SERIAL KILLER
Murder is not something new in our society today. People have been murdered even back when Jesus was alive. Murder is one issue that the media seems to always be putting forth to the community at all times. The media gives murderers more publicity than they should have on a lot of different occasions. What makes a person want to go around and kill person after person? What is it that makes a normal person click and turn in to a murder? In this paper I will show how serial killers are born with the intent to be a killer, but later learn this behavior.
This paper will demonstrate how a serial killer is born like any other human being in this world. They later adapt to their surroundings and learn the unnatural behavior that they will later demonstrate in society. The learning theory will be applied to this paper to show how a serial killer grows up with out the proper care and love and grows to have the mind of a serial killer. Humans don’t just wake up and decide one day that they can kill someone it come from built up hate and animosity, toward something or someone built up over a time period.
LITERATURE REVIEW
It is crucial for the reader to understand the learning theories and their background. “Learning is defined as habits and knowledge that develop as a result of experiences with the environment, as opposed to instincts, drives, reflexes, and genetic predispositions” (developed by Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume). The learning theories “view crime as “normal” rather than “pathological” due to the means in which criminal behavior develops; and propose that criminal behavior is learned in much the same was as noncriminal behavior”(Brown 58). Serial killers pick up things from their surroundings and their habitats.
Serial killers are often driven by the publicity that they receive from the public and the newspaper. They often get more attention for the crimes that they did not commit as oppose to the one they could have the chance to commit. This is one thing that drives the serial killer to want to commit more murders. “Despite occasional media reports to the contrary, ‘serial murderers’ are responsible for only about 1 or 2 percent of homicides each year” mass murders claim even fewer victims” (Brown 456). So the reader will be able to see that criminal behavior is learned.
Lloyd Greeson was a man who was trained in the United States Army and the Marine Corps. Some where between the years of 1946 and 1950 he was dishonorably discharged from both positions. He was then released back into the world as a United States citizen. He even had a history of robbery, vagrancy, unlawful entry. This man has already had a corrupt history of violence before he switched over to killing people. It took time for Greeson to snap in to killing people.
In 1964 Lola Cotton was murdered by Greeson in Miami, Florida. It was never proved until after Greeson had another chance to kill the following month in Wilkes –Barre, Pennsylvania. The actions that Lloyd took out on these female was some how learned some where. He has been trained in two different government agencies to know how to kill.
Each serial killer will learn and demonstrate something that can distinguish him or her from everyone else. They may even study the way one s killer before their time and try to copy them. “In Boston, 1962 the police desperately sought a sadistic serial killer who killed woman after woman in his own perverted manner”. “A killer who struck men, women and children bearing similarities to the attack pattern of Jack the ripper, the police desperately sought to apprehend the taunting mad man”.
RESEARCH METHODS
This chart below will demonstrate how serial murders have the lowest crime rate. It is low because of the fact that it has to be something that sparks the killer to go off. Other crime rates are higher because the serial killer has to grow more confident with him or her self to commit a more in depth crime.
This next chart will show that the crime rate in which a chills grows up will also help them learn the how to become a deadly killer. The amount of crime that a person sees and has contact with will shape their mind and will to kill. The more populated areas will more than likely produce more serial killers.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
This paper has shown in depth that serial killers go through a learning process. The process of learning to take another persons life is what they are trained up to do. There are circumstances in their lives that train them up to be the murders that they become. Serial killers are not born they are created through a process of torment and things that happen to them do to conditions that they can not prevent. They learn to get away with small crimes before they graduate to the big crime of murder.
The media is also one thing that pushes the learning process of Serial killers. They learn from the media and many books that are written. That is the reason that so many Serial Killers have copy cats, because the media lets them know what they can and will not get away with. Society shapes these law breakers in to natural born killers. With all of the reading materials and the TV’s. publicity, that is now present people can learn to be killers in no time. Serial Killers learn from the environment that they are around daily. The environment shapes killers every day and most people don’t really realize it. These people are often subject to disadvantages socially and economically.
REFERENCES
1. http://www.crimelibrary.com/forensics/ressler/3.htm
3. www.courttv.com/press/ressler.htm
7. Making celebrities of serial killers elevates threat http://search.epnet.com/direct
8. U.S. News & World Report, 11/4/2002, Vol. 133 Issue 17, p29, 1p Troubled minds
[Comments:
Your initial Abortion topic was a strange topic with no criminological theory or
perspective identified, which was what you were instructed to do. I don't
mean to disparage the topic, but maybe you ought to think about changing what
you want to write on. A trip to the writing center to help you get started
all over again might be a good idea. If you plan on keeping this topic,
then drop the "murdered because they lost their privacy" line and
select a known criminological perspective like conflict theory or something like
that, and call the crime of abortion your study of crimes against nature, crimes
against the family, or crimes against women.]
[Comments: Updated this page from your disk, and see you've changed your topic,
and seem to be writing confidently on it.]
[Comments: Added Part 4. Students have one last chance before the last day of
class to edit and revise their papers. Yours could use some work on the proper
format for the references section.]
Last updated: 11/26/02