James Garbarino, PhD, didn’t set out to spend so much of his life with murderers.
He planned to be a lawyer, but "stumbled into" a graduate program in human development and family studies at Cornell. He expected to spend his career teaching developmental psychology, like his mentor Urie Bronfenbrenner, PhD.
But as a professor at Penn State, the Erikson Institute, Cornell and, since 2005, Loyola University Chicago, Garbarino ended up becoming an expert on child abuse and neglect — a topic that led him to a new mission in life.
In 1992, he was asked to testify as an expert witness in a child abuse case that ended with a mother killing her child. That was the first of more than 60 murder cases in which he has helped judges and juries understand the psychology behind why people kill and helped them make more informed decisions about a defendant's guilt and punishment.
Garbarino reviews defendants' records, interviews their family members and spends hours listening to killers — often on death row — explain how they went from being innocent children to murderous adults. His goal is to explain the psychological and social factors — typically child abuse and war zone-like neighborhood environments — that contribute to a person's becoming a murderer. As he writes in his 2015 book, "Listening to Killers," "I listen for the human story behind the monstrous act."
The Monitor spoke to Garbarino about what he has learned from his work in jails and prisons around the country.
Are murderers misunderstood?
The general public tends to view murderers as absolutely evil persons or people so damaged they can't possibly live among us. But most killers are untreated traumatized children who are controlling the actions of the scary adults they have become. Trauma is fundamental, but often the general public doesn't see that part of it. They see the result of trauma rather than a murder's origins in trauma. Most of what's been done in the past in these cases is either what's called a social history, which is a biographical compendium, or clinical assessment and diagnosis. But what I do is developmental analysis. Often, the social history has a lot of facts in it, but the facts are not connected conceptually. They can say, "This kid's mother abandoned him," but don't go the next step about why maternal abandonment is so devastating. Or they'll talk about how someone was engaging in impulsive behavior as a teenager, but not why teenage brains are so vulnerable.
Developmental psychology can also help unpack a lot of the clinical diagnoses. Severe, pervasive, chronic trauma in early childhood is such a frontal assault on the basic processes of child development — attachment, emotional regulation and executive function. But when a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist sees them when they're 20 or 30, they may come up with all kinds of diagnoses, when in fact what they're simply doing is clumping together some of the outcomes from that early pervasive trauma. Developmental psychology can be a bridge between social history and assessment and diagnosis.
And then that trauma is compounded by the neighborhoods many murderers grow up in?
When I first started working on these issues, what struck me most was when I went abroad to official war zones: the Middle East, Central America and Africa. Kids growing up in those areas naturally adopted ways of looking at the world congruent with war zones. When I came back to the United States, I was struck by the parallels with kids growing up in areas with high community violence, gangs, chronic threats and stress.
I began to hear from these killers that they had developed a hypersensitivity to threat. That comes from being traumatized, having to be watchful. Another dimension is the legitimization of aggression — the belief that when you're threatened, you're morally entitled and psychologically required to defend yourself. In the extreme form, there's a belief in pre-emptive assault — get them before they get you. When you put together hypervigilance and a belief in pre-emptive assault, you get a war zone mentality.
I find it useful in a lot of cases to communicate how and why if you live in an urban war zone, it's not surprising that you develop a war zone mentality — not as a pathological development but really as normal psychological development in an abnormal situation.
What are your work's implications?
If lots of killers are untreated traumatized children controlling scary adults, one obvious place to start is to treat traumatized children. There's a growing movement toward trauma-informed communities, trauma-informed education, trauma-informed everything. For example, a colleague was talking about an eighth-grader who was so traumatized about walking from home to school through a very violent neighborhood that he would smoke weed before school to calm himself down. He was then expelled from school for being high. With a trauma-informed perspective, we'd treat that trauma, not expel someone for symptoms of unresolved trauma.
That's true when you have kids diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder and conflict disorders — all these diagnoses that claim to identify individuals who are aggressive and asocial. If we unpack them, they should be treated as symptoms or consequences of untreated traumatic disorders.
A second implication is the need to shift from the American gun culture to a demilitarized American culture. What differentiates us is the incredible physical, cultural and psychological availability of guns. If you listen to killers, you hear how their possession of guns and their enemies' possession of guns means that almost any conflict, which in other contexts would be resolved with minor injury, can end up being lethal.
The last thing is sentencing. In Norway, the maximum sentence is 21 years. Our criminal justice system is handing out not just death sentences but life without parole, which is really a sentence of death in prison. We need to roll back these extreme sentencing policies to be much more reasonable and driven by an appreciation for the possibility of rehabilitation and transformation, not absolute moral indignation that translates into "Execute them" or "Lock them up forever."
Can murderers be "cured"?
Some can, some can't. Probably more than most people suspect can recover. Modern neuroscience is telling us both about the immaturity of the brains of adolescents, which often extends to 20- and 25-year-olds, but also about the malleability of adult brains. That's good news, because it means the brain is in an interactive relationship with experience. If you change the experience you can change the brain. That's a very hopeful message.
Is the legal system starting to embrace your way of thinking?
It's starting to percolate. In Miller v. Alabama and Graham v. Florida, the Supreme Court has started to get this. In Miller, the court ruled that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole were unconstitutional for juvenile offenders. The Miller decision extended the court's 2010 ruling in Graham, which outlawed mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles convicted of all crimes except murder. There are now about 2,500 cases around the country of individuals who committed murders as teenagers and were automatically sentenced to life without parole. They may now be getting resentenced.
At the time they committed the murders, someone might have been asked to predict if they would ever be safe to release. Now, in most cases, we have 10, 15, 25 years of evidence to go on. We don't have to project and predict. We now can say retroactively what did happen. In lots of cases, that has been very positive and encouraging.
More and more now, I'm interested in talking with guys who have undergone such transformation. It's so painful for them. They've accepted the shame of what they did and the need to radically transform and do penance by suffering, by being institutionalized, having to demonstrate every day that they're capable of being a better person. But often they feel that the system doesn't reward or encourage that. They need support and encouragement.
I'm working on a parole case now where the guy was turned down for parole after 20 years, despite the fact that he had a folder of evidence three inches thick about how he had rehabilitated. But the victim's family and prosecutor said in the hearing, "We don't care if you're rehabilitated; you should spend the rest of your life in jail because of what you did." If that's their mindset, then there's nothing to do. It's also in conflict with the law, because the law says the parole decision is supposed to be based on rehabilitation, not on the family's and prosecutor's outrage about the crime. If forgiveness by the family is the criterion, almost no one would get out.
What's next for you?
My current work is prompted in part by the Miller decision. In Illinois, for example, there are about 90 cases — mostly guys who got life without parole as teenagers — whose cases are now being reviewed. I'm participating in those resentencing hearings. A similar process is beginning in Florida, and I'm playing a role there, too. I see this as the logical next step for me. "Listening to Killers" focuses mostly on how people got to killing. Now I'm mostly focusing on where they go after killing. I've also been involved in a few parole cases where people spent up to 20 years in prison but now it's five years after they were let out. How are they doing out there? Was it the right decision to release them?
I'm interested in the process of rehabilitation — the therapeutic interventions, education, spiritual development — that lets murderers come back as people who are not just safe but in some cases magnificent in their emotional sensitivity, moral principles and motivation to contribute to society and be a positive force. People assume there's a strong positive correlation between the severity of the crime people commit as young people and the degree to which these individuals are irremediable and can't be transformed. But particularly with young killers, that correlation doesn't seem to be there.
