Criminal Voyeurism

     The act of voyeurism runs the gamut of watching reality TV to window peeping to the use of hidden and clandestine cameras for one's sexual gratification. In an era of adult entertainment it seems odd that so many teachers, clergymen, politicians, bosses, lawyers and physicians have been caught using covert devices like pen cameras to satisfy their sexual curiosities.

     A man (this is not a crime usually committed by women) who risks his family, career and position in society by secretly videotaping females (and young boys) changing clothes, showering, using the restroom or merely going about their daily activity must possess a powerful sexual compulsion that by any standard is deviant. Because this form of pathological voyeurism is also a crime, the clandestine video-taper also risks going to prison. The risk/reward imbalance inherent in this bizarre behavior suggests that these voyeurs are beyond the reach of counselors and medication.

Richard Watkins

     In March 2010 an elementary school teacher in Calne, a town of 13,000 in southwest England was caught using a pen camera to video-record boys as they changed their clothes for physical education class. Richard Watkins had been doing this for two years and had thousands of clandestinely acquired images on his home computer.

     The 28-year-old teacher and former children's entertainer (said to possess "circus skills") pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of criminal voyeurism. The judge sentenced Watkins to four years in prison.

James Mucha

     In March 2011, James Mucha, an employee of a small manufacturing company in Avon Lake, Ohio was caught using a pen camera in the women's restroom. A female employee noticed a pen standing upright behind the door after she closed it. Thinking this was an odd place for a writing instrument the woman picked it up, unscrewed the cap and found a mini-camera.

     The 43-year-old pen camera owner was charged in August 2011 with three counts of voyeurism. (The company fired him.) Three months later the judge sentenced Mr. Mucha to 150 days in the county jail followed by one year of probation. The judge also fined him $2,000. (Voyeurs who video adult women usually get lighter sentences than men who record children.)

Joshua Waguespack

     In April 2012 in LeLand, Florida, police officers arrested Joshua Waguespack, a seventh grade math teacher at St. Peter's Catholic School. The 33-year-old had used a pen camera to take videos of two girls, ages 12 and 13, who used his teacher's storage closet to change into their gym clothes. He had downloaded these images onto his iPhone and iPad.

     After pleading no contest to two counts of criminal voyeurism in February 2013 the judge sentenced Mr. Waguespack to five years in prison. (This is a relatively heavy sentence for a defendant who pleaded guilty which suggests that Waguespack had a criminal history the judge didn't like.)

Dr. Adam Levison

     Having studied at the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown University and the New York Medical College where he graduated at the top of his class, Dr. Adam Levison taught robotic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital's School of Medicine in Manhattan. The 39-year-old assistant Professor of Urology lived in a posh West Greenwich Village apartment. Dr. Levison had prestige, good-looks and money. From all appearances this man had it all. He also had a lot to lose.

     On Tuesday, August 2, 2012 a New York subway transit officer, acting on a tip from two passengers riding on the train with Dr. Levison, arrested the urologist for using a pen camera clipped to a folded newspaper to take shots up women's skirts. Taken into custody at the Union Square Station during the evening rush-hour, the doctor did not protest or proclaim his innocence.

     At his arraignment the day after his arrest the judge charged Dr. Levison with second-degree unlawful surveillance. If convicted he faced a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Dr. Levison posted bail and was released.

     A search of the doctor's pen camera video footage confirmed the suspicions of his fellow subway passengers and the arresting transit officer.

     Mount Sinai Hospital, two months after the subway arrest, announced that the physician was no longer employed by the institution.

     In January 2014 Dr. Levison pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of five years probation. 

Emily Creno's Self-Serving Hoax

     On the surface there was nothing exceptional about Emily J. Creno. In 2012, the mother of an 8-year-old girl and a boy who was four, lived in Utica, a central Ohio town not far from Columbus. After the 31-year-old's marriage had gone sour her husband John moved out of the house.

     In December 2012, Emily Creno took her son J. J. to a hospital emergency room in Columbus. She told medical personnel he had suffered a series of seizures. Following blood tests, X-rays and EEG monitoring, the physician informed the mother that her son was in good health.

     Notwithstanding her son's clean bill of health, confirmed by subsequent hospital visits and various screening tests, Emily Creno told friends and family that J. J. had been diagnosed with cancer. She said J. J.  didn't have long to live. The child, thinking that he was terminally ill, basically shut down. When John Creno visited his son the boy couldn't speak or get off the couch. (Emily regularly shaved J. J.'s head to give him the appearance of someone being treated with chemotherapy.) Her estranged husband had no idea his son's illness was a hoax orchestrated by his wife. (The couple later divorced.)

     One of Emily's sympathetic friends created a Facebook page for the purpose of soliciting donations for the distraught mother and her dying son. About twenty people sent the family clothes, toys and money. One Facebook reader drove 500 miles to console Emily and the stricken boy.

     In May 2013, a Columbus woman with a daughter suffering from leukemia visited the Creno Facebook page where she read postings about J. J.'s illness and symptoms that didn't make sense. Thinking that Emily Creno was possibly soliciting money and goods on a false pretense, this woman reported her suspicion to an officer with the Utica Police Department.

     Utica detective Damian Smith, in response to the tipster's call, got in touch with the Columbus oncologist who was supposedly treating the Creno boy. The physician said he did not know Emily or her son. Further investigation, which presumably included Creno's interrogation and perhaps a polygraph test, established the fact that her son's terminal illness was nothing more that a product of her imagination and deception.

     Licking County prosecutor Tracy Van Winkle in September 2013 charged Emily Creno with one count of third-degree child endangerment. Shortly thereafter police officers took the suspect into custody on the felony charge. A local magistrate set her bail at $50,000. The prosecutor told reporters she would present the case to a grand jury which could result in additional charges related to fraud and theft by deception.    

     On May 7, 2014, Emily Creno after pleading no contest to charges of theft and endangering a child, was sentenced to 18 months in prison by Judge Thomas Marcelain. The judge also ordered her to pay back the money donated to her phony cause. At the sentence hearing Judge Marcelain said Creno's ploy had been intended to get her husband back, a scheme that got out of hand.

     In terms of motive this could have been a Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) case. Mothers with this disorder make their children ill to gain sympathy and attention from friends, family and hospital personnel. Quite often the MSBP subject is trying to attract the attention of an indifferent or estranged spouse. Even if Emily Creno didn't poison her son to make him ill, her cancer hoax could be explained in the context of this disorder. In other words, the motive behind this dreadful case may have been pathological rather than theft by deception. It should be noted, however, that Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy does not constitute a recognized legal defense. It is not the same as legal insanity because MSBP mothers are fully aware of what they are doing and that what they are doing is wrong. 

Bernard Goetz: The Subway Vigilante

     In the 1980s, muggers, rapists and panhandling bums ruled the streets, trains and subway stations of New York City. The Bronx looked like a post World War II city that had been bombed to rubble. Prostitutes, pimps, x-rated store fronts, strip joints, three-card monte stands, street corner drug dealers and thieves selling their loot were entrenched in Manhattan's Times Square. New York had become a seedy, smelly, dangerous place. Tourism had dropped off and people doing legitimate business throughout the city struggled. Corrupt and incompetent politicians had let the Big Apple rot. Law abiding residents of New York were angry, frightened and fed-up. 

     In 1981, a gang of muggers in a Canal Street subway station beneath Manhattan beat-up and robbed 34-year-old Bernard Goetz. After the attack, Mr. Goetz, the owner of a small electronics business in Greenwich Village, started carrying a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

     On December 22, 1984, at five-thirty in the evening, while riding the Number 2 train under Manhattan, four black teenagers approached Bernard Goetz and asked him for money. Believing that the youths were about to rob him, Goetz pulled out his S & W 38 and shot each kid once. The boys survived, but one of them, Darrell Cabey, was left brain-damaged and paralyzed.

     The subway shootings grabbed headlines in New York City and baffled the police who had no idea who shot the teens. Nine days after the incident Bernard Goetz turned himself into the police and identified himself as the so-called "Subway Vigilante." The case divided New Yorkers by race. Blacks vilified Goetz as a trigger-happy racist. Many whites hailed him as a crime-fighting hero. The subway vigilante case symbolized a citizenry fed-up with out-of-control street crime and a broken criminal justice system.

     Manhattan's district attorney, fearing massive civil disorder, threw the book at Mr. Goetz, charging him with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon. In January 1988 the jury in the high-profile trial acquitted the defendant of all charges but the third-degree weapons offense. The judge sentenced Goetz to one year in jail. Nine months later he was free.

     In 1990, Darrell Cabey, the person Goetz paralyzed, sued him for $50 million. Six years later the jury awarded Cabey $43 million in damages. That year Goetz declared bankruptcy.

     In 2001, Bernard Goetz ran for mayor. He lost and became a vegetarian activist who spent his time nursing injured squirrels. 

     On December 22, 2011, twenty-seven years to the day he was shot by Goetz on the train, James Ramseur was found dead of a drug overdose. Asked to comment on Ramseur's death by a reporter with the New York Daily News Goetz said, "It sounds like he was depressed."

     On Friday, November 1, 2013 a female undercover cop cracking down on Ganja (a highly resinous form of cannabis) peddlers in Union Square Park at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan, was approached by a tall, thin man in his sixties who asked if she wanted to get high. When the cop said yes, Bernard Goetz said he would go to his apartment and return with $30 worth of marijuana. Upon his return from his Greenwich Village dwelling with the weed, the undercover cop placed him under arrest. A Manhattan prosecutor charged Goetz with the misdemeanor offense of criminal sale of marijuana. Suddenly Bernard Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, was back in the news. 

     Shortly after Goetz's marijuana arrest, the prosecutor dropped the charges and Bernard Goetz, once a household name, returned to obscurity.

The Fanatical Sports Fan

      According to experts, the psychology underlying fanatical sports fandom is a product of narcissism, juvenilia and borderline sociopathy. While some sports fanatics are just loud and obnoxious, a few can become violent and dangerous.

     Kurt Paschke, by anyone's standard, was an over-the-top super-fan. The 38-year-old lived in a rented house across the street from his parents in the Long Island town of Holbrook, New York. Kurt worked as a bartender at the Village Tavern in nearby Huntington. A rabid New York Jets football fan and a season ticket-holder, he was one of those guys who paints his face in team colors and religiously wears the team jersey, hat and other gear. But as a fan, Kurt Paschke was so much more.

     To show his devotion to his Jets, Kurt purchased a mini-bus he called the Jets Mobile. Out of this custom painted vehicle he tailgated at the Jets' home games at the MetLife Stadium in Queens. Painted green and white in homage to his beloved team, the bus featured a special Jets vanity plate as well as Jets inspired mud flaps and hubcaps. Kurt's mother had embroidered, for the Jets Mobile, team themed seat covers and interior curtains.

     On October 20, 2013 the hated Boston Patriots were in New York for a game against the Jets. On that Sunday afternoon the Jets, in overtime play, beat the Patriots 30 to 27. As Kurt and his jubilant parents were leaving MetLife Stadium following their glorious victory they were confronted by three angry Boston Patriot fans. Someone said something that sparked angry words and then a fight between Paschke and Boston fans Jaclyn Nugent, Amanda MacDowell and David James Sacco.

     In the skirmish, caught on videotape, Jaclyn Nugent can be seen hitting and kicking Paschke. The Jets fan retaliated by punching the 26-year-old Boston woman in the head. After the blow Nugent lunged at Paschke and the two scuffled. The fight ended on its own before security personnel broke it up. Paschke and Nugent, with bruises and cuts on their faces, parted ways.

     The post-game dustup at MetLife Stadium would have ended there had it not been for the online publication of videos showing a big strapping man in a Jets jersey punching a woman in the face. And the story got even bigger when the media found out more about the man in the Jets shirt.

     Kurt Paschke, as it turned out, was more than just a Jets fanatic who punched a female Boston fan. Decades earlier he had served three years in prison for negligent homicide. (He had since been arrested twice for disorderly conduct and once for serving drinks to a minor.)

     On June 27, 1992, shortly after Paschke graduated from Sachem High School in Ronkonkoma, Long Island he got into a fight with another 17-year-old behind a pizzeria in Sayville, New York. Paschke pulled a knife and stabbed Henry Ferrer to death. Ferrer was not armed.

     In 1995 a jury found Paschke guilty of negligent homicide. In addressing the judge at his sentencing hearing, Paschke said, "I am deeply sorry. I can honestly say I never sought the confrontation, but when it came, I did what I had to do." Paschke served three years in a New York state prison. The judge also sentenced him to several years of probation.

     In the aftermath of Paschke's fight with the Patriot fans, Paschke's mother Colleen, in speaking to a CNN correspondent, defended her son. The 62-year-old from Holbrook said, "If the girl is going to be out of control like that, why can't a guy defend himself? These girls today are really out of control. I really think that they are protected because they are girls and think they can get away with anything." Later, to a reporter with the New York Daily News, Kurt's mother said, "My son is the victim, really."

     Robert Ferrer, the 80-year-old father of the boy Paschke killed in 1992 wasn't in a mood to defend Kurt Paschke. Obviously still bitter over the violent death of his son Henry, Mr. Ferrer said this to the New York Daily News reporter: "He murdered my son and he got a minimum sentence for killing a 17-year-old boy. He got away with it because his father was a sergeant. [Kurt's father was an officer with the Suffolk County Police Department.] I was dead after it happened. I had a very nice house on Long Island [Bay Shore] and I sold it to get away. The guy is a born criminal."

     A Suffolk County prosecutor charged Paschke, Nugent, Sacco and MacDowell with disorderly conduct and assault. Until the case was resolved all four football fans were banned from MetLife Stadium. For Kurt Paschke this punishment went beyond cruel and unusual.

     In March 2014, in the case of punching out the Boston Patriots fan, Kurt Paschke pleaded guilty to the lesser disorderly charge of unnecessary noise. The judge fined him $289. Charges against the other three fans were dropped.

     Paschke, in August 2014 completed a four-hour fan conduct class. Following the completion of the good-behavior course, and a written apology, Paschke was granted the right to return to MetLife Stadium. He got his life back.

     In November 2017 Kurt Paschke was among ten finalists for induction into the New York Jets Fan Hall of Fame. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Shortly after the announcement went public, however, when the induction committee learned of this fan's violent past, Kurt Paschke was no longer up for consideration for the honor. For him, this must have been a terrible blow.

Ice Cream Truck Wars: Sno Cone Joe Versus Mr. Ding-A-Ling

     When imagining men who sell ice cream products out of good humor trucks one envisions jolly Mr. Rogers types dressed in white. But why would mobile ice cream vendors be any different than people who drive taxi cabs, UPS trucks and buses. Not that there's anything wrong with those folks.

     In the 1970s and 80s Robert Pronge, the driver of a New Jersey Mister Softee's Truck moonlighted as a contract killer. Pronge became known for his use of cyanide to complete many of his assignments. (He dropped the poison in his targets' whiskey and beer, not their Mister Softee cones.) On occasion, however, he'd keep his victims cooling in his Mr. Softee truck until he could permanently dispose of their corpses. The hit man, referred to in certain circles as "Mr. Softee", ended up being murdered by Richard Kuklnski, the prolific Gambino family contract killer known as the "Ice Man." Mr. Kuklnski introduced "Mr. Softee" to the idea of using cyanide as a murder weapon. In all probability Robert Pronge is the only hit man in history who hauled his dead bodies around in an ice cream truck. But compared to Richard Kuklnski who killed more than 200 men for money, "Mr. Softee" was an amateur. "Ice Man" Kuklinki was a cold-blooded sociopath while "Mr. Softee" was just crazy. He did, however, sell a lot of ice cream and from all accounts loved children.

The Ice Cream Truck War

     In Gloversville New Jersey 34-year-old Joshua Malatino, the owner of the local Sno Cone Joe franchise, also sold a lot of ice cream. His 21-year-old girlfriend, Amanda Scott, helped him operate his good humor truck. Business was good in Gloversville until a rival good humor man rolled into town in his Mr. Ding-A-Ling truck.

     Mr. Malatino, aka Sno Cone Joe, decided to harass his business rival, 53-year-old Brian Collis aka Mr. Ding-A-Ling. On April 16, 19 and 28, 2013 Joshua Malatino, with his Sno Cone Joe jingles blaring from his truck tailgated Mr. Ding-A-Ling around town. Whenever Mr. Collis stopped to service a customer Sno Cone Joe would pull up behind Mr. Ding-A-Ling and offer the consumer free ice cream. At one point Mr. Malatino allegedly phoned Mr. Ding-A-Ling headquarters in Latham New Jersey and said, "I own this town!"

     On May 3, 2013 a local prosecutor charged  Joshua Malatino and Amanda Scott with harassment and misdemeanor stalking. If convicted Sno Cone Joe and Sno Cone Jane (just kidding) faced up to three months in jail. According to Gloversville Police Captain John Sira, Mr. Malatino had forced a different ice cream truck operator out of town the previous summer.

     In April 2015 a Fulton County judge dismissed the charges against Joshua Malatino and Amanda Scott. 

The Crime Victim's Plight

     In our criminal justice system, when one commits a crime, it's not against the victim of that offense, but against the state. This legal fiction is derived from English common law where all crime was against the king. The crime-against-the-state concept means that real victims of crime have no say in how or if their cases are prosecuted, or even if they are investigated. The system is completely under the control of police and prosecutors. As a result, many victims of crime are victimized twice, first by the criminal and then by the legal system.

     The small percentage of crimes that lead to someone's arrest are usually offenses that require little or no investigation. Criminal investigators hate mysteries, and prosecutors avoid complicated, difficult cases that may not result in convictions. At least 90 percent of this country's criminal convictions are the result of plea bargains. Over the years fewer and fewer criminal cases go to trial. As a result very few convicted criminals end up in prison for the crimes they have actually committed. For example, criminals who commit aggravated assault plead guilty to simple assault, rapists plead to lesser sexual offenses and murderers go to prison for voluntary manslaughter.

     Usually the victims of crime, when it comes to their criminal cases, are ignored and kept in the dark. The only time they play a role in determining the fate of the people who victimized them is when they are called to testify on behalf of the prosecution. This, of course, exposes them to grueling cross-examinations by aggressive defense attorneys. In many rape cases it's the victim who ends up on trial.

     Among the most abused victims of crime are children who satisfy the perverted sexual urges of America's huge pedophile population. The victims of these sexual predators are thrown to the wolves by organizations like the Catholic Church and The Boy Scouts of America who are more interested in self-preservation than child protection and criminal justice. Because their victims are powerless intimidated children, only a small percentage of pedophiles end up in prison. And when some of these degenerates are eventually identified the passage of time makes it impossible to prosecute them.

     For people who live in cities where district attorneys no longer prosecute what they consider low-level crime, the likelihood of being harassed in the street by a homeless person begging for drug money, having one's car broken into, or losing a wallet or purse to a mugger, increases dramatically. The crime rates in these decriminalized cities has skyrocketed. In places like Los Angeles, News York, Seattle, Chicago and Philadelphia, these "progressive" prosecutors blame society for driving poor oppressed criminals into lives of crime. In other words, the victims of crimes are not only ignored, they are blamed for their own victimhood.

     Crime victims, particularly in cases of celebrated offenses, are brutalized by the media. This is because in America true crime sells newspapers and books and attracts television viewers. The more horrific the crime the more value it has as entertainment.

     In the late Twentieth Century attempts to provide victims a larger say in the criminal justice process led to the formation of a variety of victim's rights organizations that lobbied for such reforms as victim impact statements at sentencing hearings, victim compensations funds and notification rules that require the authorities to notify crime victims of the early release of prisoners.

     The crime victim's plight is not limited to the way our criminal justice system works. Society itself, particularly with regard to murder cases, does not fully know how to deal with, or fully understand, the profound and prolonged suffering of murder victims' families. This reality has led to the formation of victim support groups like Parents of Murdered Children, an organization with chapters across the country.

     While crime victims today have it slightly better than before, most of the attention and concern among politicians, defense attorneys and academics is directed at the criminal. For example, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders believes that even convicted terrorists should be allowed to vote. Nancy Pelosi took offense when Donald Trump referred to MS 13 gang members as "animals." 

     Criminal justice reform legislation usually ends up letting more criminals out of prison. When too many Americans break our drug laws, state legislators across the country make more drugs legal. And while it's hard to believe, there are attorneys in the country who devote their entire careers to saving the lives of death row inmates who have committed unspeakable crimes. Meanwhile, the families of victims who were tortured, raped and murdered by these criminal sociopaths are ignored.

Tattoos As Human License Plates

     A mother in Georgia got into trouble for taking her 10-year-old son to a tattoo shop where he got tattooed in honor of his dead brother. The local prosecutor's office charged the woman with child cruelty. Under Georgia law only physicians and osteopaths can tattoo people under 18. (Why would a doctor ink a kid in the first place?) This story got me thinking about tattoos and the role they play, and have played, in the identification of criminals and their victims.

     Not too long ago people most likely to get a tattoo were enlisted military personnel, prison inmates and members of street gangs. Truman Capote, the author of "In Cold Blood," once told a journalist that of the dozens of mass murderers and serial killers he had interviewed all of them had tattoos. Today, that would surprise no one. In 2006, according to a Pew Research Center survey, more than 36 percent of people between the ages 18 and 40 had at least one tattoo. This percentage is probably much higher now. (It seems that 90 percent of college and professional football and basketball players are tattooed. This is also true of boxers.) 

     Tattoos, along with clothing, personal belongings, fingerprints, scars, moles and teeth are helpful in the identification of corpses that have been dumped in the water, in fields and in the woods. In 1935 two fishermen caught a shark off the coast of Sydney, Australia. They took the live fish to a local aquarium where it disgorged a human arm that had been severed by a knife. The arm also bore a distinctive tattoo that led to the identification of a murder victim named James Smith. Smith had been an ex-boxer with a history of crime. The case became known as the Shark Arm Murder.

     The police routinely ask crime victims and eyewitnesses if the suspect had tattoos. Former prison inmates and members of street gangs unwillingly assist law enforcement by identifying themselves as such through their inked individualized body markings. In England in the late 1800s, before criminal identification bureaus adopted fingerprints, identification clerks took note of arrestees' tattoos and their locations, data classified and filed for future retrieval. Today, in California, the CALGANG database consists of a collection of gang tattoos. The state of Florida has a database that features about 372,000 tattoos of people who have been arrested there.

     In 2010 Michigan State University licensed tattoo matching technology to Morpho Trak, the world's leading provider of biometric (eye, hand, signature and voice ID) identification systems. Corrections and law enforcement officers use the tattoo database to identify criminal suspects and homicide victims.

     Dr. Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Penn State says that "Tattoos are part of an ancient and universal tradition of human self-declaration and expression." In some cases these tattoos express anti-social attitudes and declare that their owners have histories of crime.

Prison Health Care

     There is something profoundly wrong with a government that provides convicted felons with better health care than it does to many sick people who haven't committed crimes against their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is what happens when a criminal justice system is organized around the idea of protecting the defendant. In Massachusetts, for example, a judge ordered the state to finance the sex change of a man who had murdered his wife. If Robert Kosilek hadn't strangled his wife to death taxpayers would not have been forced to pay the cost of changing him into a female.

     In 2005 a judge in California, after determining that prison health in that state was unconstitutionally substandard, granted a so-called "receiver" the power to hire state medical personnel and set their pay levels. In 2004 the prison health care bill cost California taxpayers $1.1 billion. In 2012 the cost of providing California inmates quality health care cost the state $2.3 billion. Between 2005 and 2012 the number of California prison system health care workers--doctors, nurses, dentists, physical therapists and psychiatrists--jumped from 5,100 to 12,000. The system also employed 1,400 health care paper shufflers.

     In 2011, 44 of California's highest paid employees worked in the prison health care system. A psychiatrist who worked at the Salinas Valley State Prison, in 2012, made $803,270. A prison doctor in northern California in 2011 had a base salary of $239,572 plus $169,548 in overtime for working nights and weekends. A registered nurse at the High Desert State Prison pulled down $246,000 that year. In bankrupt California, when it came to health care, nothing was too good for the state's 124,700 state prison inmates. (These prison health care expenses didn't include the tens of thousands of county jail prisoners throughout the state.)

      Beginning in 2006, heroin addicted inmates at Albuquerque's Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico's largest jail were treated with methadone to ease the trauma of withdrawal. Warden Ramon Rustin, in November 2012, announced that the $10,000-a-month program was too expensive, that county taxpayers couldn't afford this in-jail drug treatment measure. Rustin, the former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with 32 years experience in the corrections field, said he didn't believe the costly program helped drug-addicted inmates stay out of jail once they were released.

     A month after Warden Rustin's effort to save the county money, the  county commissioners ordered him to extend the program two months during which time a study of its effectiveness would be conducted. (This is typical government. In the private sector studies of cost-effectiveness are ongoing, and if a measure wastes money it's immediately cut.) The county also received $200,000 a year from the state to help fund its methadone program.

     When a person commits a crime that is serious enough to land him in prison, any health care he or she receives while in custody should be treated as a privilege rather than a constitutional right. The rule should be this: If you want good health care don't murder anyone, rob a store, break into a home, beat your wife and children or commit a sexual assault. If good health is your priority, exercise, quit smoking, eat right and stay off drugs and booze. Also, get a job. If you want to switch genders while in prison that's fine, but you don't deserve to have law obeying taxpayers foot the bill.

     In the United States, when it comes to health care, crime pays and at the expense of law obeying tax payers. 

The Impulse Murder

     Murders cannot always be explained or understood. While the majority of criminal homicides are motivated either by greed, lust, power, fear, rage or mental illness, every once in awhile someone takes a life for no apparent reason. These cases are disturbing because there is a need to make sense out of such deviant, violent behavior.

     In 1958 Dr. Marvin Wolfgang (1924-1998) a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, coined the term "victim precipitation" in his classic text, Profiles in Criminal Homicide. 

     According to Professor Wolfgang, in a high percentage of criminal homicides the victim contributed to his or her fate by being the first to begin "the interplay of criminal violence" such as drawing a weapon or striking the first blow. In terms of motive, these homicides are easy to understand.

     In his 1967 book The Subculture of Violence Dr. Wolfgang found that a high percent of criminal homicides are crimes of passion that are "unplanned, explosive and determined by sudden motivational bursts." These killers act so quickly on their impulses there is simply no time for reasoning or restraint. Homicide investigators are familiar with subjects who have killed people for the smallest of reasons such as a casual argument over an insignificant point, a minor insult or a mild frustration over something trivial. Investigators call these killings "simplicity of motive" cases.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara: The Great Imposter

     While most people aren't con artists, charlatans and swindlers, many are, in various degrees, cheats and pretenders. Men without military experience impersonate war heroes, politicians pretend to lead, bureaucrats impersonate competent employees and job applicants falsely claim qualifications and work histories. It's not uncommon for young men to break the law by impersonating cops and FBI agents. Because most law enforcement impostors are inept they are quickly caught.

     In 1937, 16-year-old Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. ran away from his home in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He took up residence with Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, then in 1941, joined the Army. A year later Demara went AWOL. Under the name Anthony Ignolia he lived in another monastery before signing up with the Navy. Demara next faked his suicide, adopted the name Robert Lincoln French, and began playing the role of a religiously oriented psychologist. This led to a teaching position in a college psychology department.

     Bored with teaching, Demara worked as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, then moved to Washington State where he taught at St. Martin's College. The FBI interrupted his impersonation career by arresting him for desertion. That resulted in an 18-month stretch in a federal prison.

     Following his release from the federal penitentiary, Demara joined the Brothers of Christian Instruction order in Maine. There Demara became friends with a young physician which led to the impostor becoming a trauma surgeon aboard a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer during the Korean War. Demara actually operated on 16 South Korean soldiers wounded in combat. He managed this by speed-reading surgical textbooks. All of his patients survived Although later exposed as a phony physician, the Canadian Navy did not press charges.

     In 1951, as Brother John Payne of the Christian Brothers of Instruction, Demara founded a college called La Mennais College of Alfred Maine. He left the state shortly thereafter. (In 1959, the college moved to Canton, Ohio and in 1960 changed its name to Walsh College. In 1993 Walsh College became Walsh University.)

     In the early 1960s Demara worked as a prison administrator in Huntsville, Texas and as a counselor at the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles. In 1967, at age 46, he received a Graduate Certificate in Bible from Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon. In the late 1970s Demara became a chaplain at a hospital in Anaheim, California. He became ill in 1980, and on June 7, 1982 died at the age of 62.

     Demara had become famous in the late 1950s after he sold his story to Life Magazine. In 1961, Tony Curtis played him in a popular movie called "The Great Impostor." Demara credited his impostor success to his high IQ, his photographic memory and his understanding of institutional politics. 

Climate Change and Crime Rates

     On August 1, 2013, in the academic journal Science, three University of California at Berkeley researchers published an article entitled "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict." The authors, based on their analysis of sixty other studies, concluded that even small increases in temperature causes rises in assaults, rapes and murders as well as increases in group conflicts and war. The researchers believed this to be true in the United States and around the world.

     The authors' prediction of rising temperatures and rising crime rates assumed a global temperature increase of at least four degrees Fahrenheit over the next fifty years. The authors predicted that between now and 2050, the world will experience a 65 percent increase in war and civil unrest. Citing spikes in assaults, domestic violence, rape and murder in the United States during heat waves, the researchers predicted that worldwide the rate of these crimes will jump 16 percent.

     Criminologists, psychologists and psychiatrists have been arguing for decades over the causes of crime. Overpopulation, broken homes, failing schools, poverty, drugs, hormones, personality disorders, mental illness, depression, childhood abuse, pornography, guns, spiritual decay and violent video games have been blamed for violent crime in the United States.

     The truth is, no one has figured out why some people commit serious crime and others do not. Social scientists who study criminal behavior agree on just two things: young people commit more crimes than older citizens; and men tend to be more violent than women. When considering why people act the way they do, too many variables makes a unifying theory impossible.

    The three University of California at Berkeley academics, none of whom were a criminologist, psychologist or psychiatrist, claimed that global warming was a key factor in the cause of violent behavior. These researchers were not only linking violent behavior to climate, they told us exactly how much crime will go up depending on how hot it got. 

     Over the years social scientists have published a lot of nonsense. This is particularly true when the subject involves the causes of crime. Based upon the reaction of other academic researchers to this Berkeley study, there was widespread skepticism of the global warming/crime theory, and that the key to understanding human behavior can be found in crime and weather statistics. 

Fake Humans

[In dealing with a psychopath] we are not dealing with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. This smoothly operating psychic apparatus not only reproduces consistent specimens of good human reasoning but also appropriates simulations of normal human emotions in response to nearly all the varied stimuli of life. So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him can point out in scientific or objective terms why he is not real. And yet one knows or feels he knows that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here.

Dr. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 1941

Protecting Child Abusers

If we really care about the sufferings of innocent children we would not for one moment consider turning loose the swarms of muggers and child molesters who the system has already caught…As the Marquis of Halifax said, "Whenever a knave is not punished, an honest man is laughed at." Our continued refusal to do the right thing can only be the result of cowardice and a callous indifference. By turning over the entire business to social workers and psychologists, we think we have discharged our responsibility, when all we have actually done is wash our hands.

Thomas Fleming, "Successful Crimes," Chronicle of Culture, March 1986

Instruments of Good and Evil

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

Jeff Cooper, The Art of the Rifle, 1997

Deciding To Be Violent

That violent criminals decide to act violently based on their interpretation of a situation would be a radical discovery when psychiatry, psychology and sociology assign violent acts to unconscious motivations, deep emotional needs, inner psychic conflicts or sudden unconscious emotional outbursts. But [Dr. Lonnie] Athens [an American criminologist] quickly discovered that violent criminals interpreted the world differently than did their law-abiding neighbors, and that it was from those differing interpretations that their violence emerged. Violent acts, he began to see, were not explosions: They were decisions.

Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, 1999

The Innocent Youth Fallacy

     My brother Ed is a criminal lawyer who often handles juvenile cases. He once told me, "I look at some of my young clients and tell myself, 'That's a kid.' Then I say to myself, 'That's also a criminal.'" Perhaps none of us can easily resolve this conflict in our own minds.

     The television version of crime usually portrays middle-aged offenders or victims. When the young are there, they are portrayed as innocents corrupted by those older. This is the innocent youth fallacy.

     I have heard many people say, "Let's keep the young offenders separate from the hard-bitten older offenders, who will be a bad influence on them." If you ask the prison officials, they tell you something different. The young offenders give them the most trouble. The reason to keep the ages separate is to protect the older prisoners from the young thugs.

Marcus Felson, Crime & Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998

Montaigne on Human Nature

     The evil in the world tends to strike us with more force, and more often, than the good. It is not easy to come up with the opposites of Stalin or Hitler. Evil has repute and power, good is passive, anonymous. But the question remains: Is the good and evil in people indeed distributed by chance and at random?...

     According to [the 16th century French philosopher Montaigne], both instincts and reason impel human nature, but reason is weak. The principal human failing, Montaigne believed, is arrogance, the presumption that through the intellect the truth can be revealed. We are barely superior to the animals, who are stronger, friendlier, and often wiser. Our senses deceive us, and we would do better humbly to acknowledge and accept our limitations. Life can be lived only by following our best instincts. We gain nothing by pondering life, since the future is outside our control. We are what we are; reason can neither change nor tame us; what animates us is unknown. This view of Montaigne is diametrically opposed to the Stoic tradition, which says that by knowing ourselves we can learn self-control and live exemplary lives, like that of the patron saint of all philosophers, Socrates.

A. J. Dunning, Extremes, 1990

Crime, Police, and the Loss of Freedom

When physical safety becomes a major problem even for the middle classes, we must of necessity become a heavily policed, authoritarian society, a society in which the middle classes live in gated and walled communities and make their places of work hardened targets...Both the fear of crime and the escalating harshness of the response to it will sharply reduce Americans' freedom of movement and peace of mind. Ours will become a most unpleasant society in which to live. [Police under-response to crime also threatens law obeyers' freedom.]

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, 1996

Crime Statistics

Criminal statistics are based on recorded criminality. This criminality consists of offenses which, having come to the notice of public authorities through complaints lodged by private citizens or directly as a result of police patrol, etc., are registered by such authorities. This recorded criminality is only a sample of the total criminality, the latter being an unknown quantity. [Police agencies are notorious for fudging local crime statistics to make it appear they are preventing crime and the jurisdiction is much safer than it really is.]

Thorsten Sellen, "The Significance of Records of Crime," in The Criminal in Society, Leon Radzinowicz and Marvin Wolfgang, Editors, 1971 

Violent Crime as Entertainment

American culture as a whole has cultivated a taste for violence that seems to be insatiable. We are a people obsessed with violence, and consequently, our entertainment industry is driven by such violence. The violence of our popular culture reflected in movies, TV programs, magazines, and fact or fiction books in the latter part of the twentieth century has made the shocking realism of this violence a routine task that we all face. Our own sense of humanity is anesthetized to the point of losing consciousness. [The trend has continued into the twenty-first century. A recent study showed that movies rated R in the 1990s are much milder than their modern counterparts. Moreover, the Internet is a venue for people who enjoy the aftermath of criminal deviance and raw violence.]

Steven A. Egger, The Killers Among Us, 1998