Monsters in Our Midst

Serial killers and sexual predators--they are human monsters in our midst who predate on us in horrendous ways, leaving a wake of destruction across time and place. When I listen to news reports about the BTK and Homolka serial killers and about the sexual predators who killed Dylan Groene and those little girls not long ago in Florida, however, I have to shake my head in wonder. After studying and teaching about deviant behaviors and working with both perpetrators and victims of crimes for years now, I am mystified why our society refuses to treat sexual predators and serial murderers like we treat carriers of typhoid, ebola, and other devastating diseases. Why not quarantine for life in a special facility those who suffer from certain mental disorders that affect public safety and health to the degree that serial homicide and sexual predation does?

There is enough psychiatric and criminological evidence to show that the behaviors demonstrated by repeated sexual predation and homicide are related to anti-social personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other mental diseases that simply cannot be cured or easily controlled. Yet, how have we been containing those afflicted with those disorders who come to the attention of the public? Those who have demonstrated their lethality and who finally are caught after committing innumerable atrocities are often sent to Death Row. Those who have served sentences for non-lethal sexual predation are released into our communities where many are apt to predate again and escalate to homicide. And, they are able to do this despite having their pictures and their addresses being entered into various law enforcement databases. However, the databases cannot be relied on alone to prevent a predator from striking again. In Florida, Jessica Lunsford might have still been alive when police called on the predator's home in the Lunsfords' neighborhood. But, other persons at the predator's residence refused to disclose to police that he was living there.

It seems to me that at least two things prevent us from admitting that we are dealing with diseases and those who suffer from them: 1) the enormity of the atrocities that shock public audiences, and 2) the tendency in mainstream American culture to see causes of social and even natural phenomena first in terms of individual responsibility and causes. There is a third consideration as well. When a psychiatrist took the stand in 1992 and testified that Jeffrey Dahmer, the "Milwaukee Cannibal," was sane when he killed his victims, a chorus of groans escaped from those of us who work with damaged people and study and teach about them. Here was a guy who only had condiments in his refrigerator because his latest supply of groceries was the person he had last killed. Does this sound like a sane person? But, it is on this point of what is deemed sane or insane that sentences hang. In the eyes of the law, simply having a mental disorder does not make one insane. The insanity defense that many serial killers plead is almost always unsuccessful because the legal definition of insanity is based on whether he or she knew the difference from right and wrong, the level of premeditation in advance of the slayings, and the lack of delusions or hallucinations. However, the clinical fact remains: we would be hard pressed to find a someone who has met the definition of a serial killer or sexual predator who does not suffer from at least one severe mental disorder.

We would not put to death a "Typhoid Mary," but we would take action to rein in a HIV-infected individual who was discovered to be having unprotected sex with a multitude of unwary partners. An effort would be made to detain and quarantine those afflicted persons. So, why not treat serial killers and sexual predators as we would treat those who are infected with lethal diseases, the effects of which would shock the public in either gruesome suffering of a few or in the incapacitation and death of great numbers of citizenry?

When I train students to examine public policies and pieces of legislation, I typically have them employ a perspective that has them looking for the obvious and not-so-obvious functions and dysfunctions of policies and laws on the books or those that might be proposed. What do I see from this perspective when I take a look at a program of lifetime quarantine containment for sexual predators and serial killers?

The obvious functions of quarantine are: 1) increasing the public's health and safety, which includes the protection of children and other vulnerable citizens, 2) providing optimal treatment and handling unique to those who have sexually predated and serially murdered, 3) establishing a venue to research the mental disorders and the social and biological correlates that lead to the production of sexual predation and serial homicide.

The not-so-obvious functions of quarantine are many. A useful network would emerge from the creation of a joint quarantine containment program administration. Such a network would at least involve the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Bureau of Prisons and may include inputs through the Department of Homeland Security. Jobs would be created from the infrastructure that would contain and research these populations and their diseases. Such a program and its facility would provide jobs to an economically blighted area such as those in Nevada and Utah where mining jobs have disappeared. A quarantine program would take certain types of criminals and crimes out of the debate over the death penalty. And, it would ease certain tensions within the world system of societies concerning the death penalty in America.

Of course, we must expect some obvious dysfunctions of proposing a quarantine containment program for serial killers and sexual predators. There would be a certain amount of NIMBY reaction. Even those suffering from economic blight might feel even more blighted by having a large quarantine facility in their midst containing every person in America who has made the grade as a serial killer and sexual predator. We might also expect a certain amount of public outrage that certain criminals could not draw the death penalty (as in the case of the serial killers and sexual predators who kill). We might expect a certain amount of public outrage -- in the other direction--over criminals who would not be allowed their freedom following the commission of non-lethal sexual predations, no matter how much time they had served and how well behaved they had been in quarantine. And, of course, there would be a perception among bean counters that the costs would outweigh the gains in the formation of the infrastructure to contain and quarantine sexual predators and serial murderers.

One not-so-obvious dysfunction might take some time to emerge. For example, some controversy may develop over the categorical definitions of what constitutes a sexual predator. A "rehabilitatable" incestuous father who molested his daughter in situations that correlated to his substance abuse might find himself facing lifetime containment in a quarantine facility. For, there may arise a certain amount of popular pressure that finds its way into the courts to remand him there. Another such latent dysfunction would be that treating these criminals with mental disorders to a quarantine containment program would open up debate about other categories of criminals who were not insane when they committed their crimes but had severe mental disorders that might have contributed to their behaviors in relation to those crimes. Such debate would be a hobgoblin for those in favor for the death penalty for murderers who are mentally developmentally disabled or suffering from some other form of mental disorder.

However, I view such a debate as a good thing, both from the standpoint of the public's health and safety and for the humane treatment of those incarcerated for their crimes against the public. We may not be personally responsible for the monsters in our midst, but it is incumbent upon us as responsible citizens to seek out ways to ensure that they do not strike and to prevent their generation among us.

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Dr. Marilyn Dudley-Rowley is the founder of OPS-Alaska, a think tank/network collaborative of scholars, scientists, and engineers devoted to the expansion of the human ecology, located in Petaluma. She lectures on sociology, social psychology, criminal justice, and political science topics in Bay Area colleges and universities and is a specialist in the studies of deviant behaviors and the development of public policy.