DR. GARBARINO DISCUSSES DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Forensic Psychology is a podcast that provides an illuminating window
into the workings of the criminal mind. Now here's your host,
doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome everyone. Well, I'm really excited. I got a great
guest today, doctor James Garbarino. He's got some really intriguing books.
We're going to be talking a little bit about each one,
but we're going to focus on serial killers today. One
of his books, the most recent, is Miller's Children, while
giving teenage killers a second chance matters for all of us.
In addition is listening to Killers. Lessons learned for my
twenty years as a psychological expert. Witness number three is

(00:57):
lost Boys, Why our sons turn violent? In how we
can say them. So I'm really excited to get going
on this discussion today. So let's welcome to the show.
Doctor Garberino.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome, sir, Thank you, it's good to be with you.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Great to have you here. Well, I've also forgotten he's
professor emeritus at Cornell University and Loyola, So I've got
to mention that. So, Professor, let me ask you this.
I guess first question is that I was curious about
what got you started in this.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Well, I got my PhD in nineteen seventy three in
human development at Cornell and I always had an interest
in social issues that affected the lives of children and adolessons.
So over the years after I sort of began my career,
I worked particular issues of child abuse, socially toxic environments

(01:46):
for kids. And then when I moved to Chicago in
nineteen eighty five, students there kept talking about the impact
of community violence on the kids that they were working with.
So I started to put together the community violence and
the domestic violence and how that was manifest in the
lives of young people, particularly and particularly in acts of violence.

(02:11):
And so I had been doing that work and then
out of the blue, I got a call from a
lawyer who said, I've got this murder case of the
teenager who killed another teenager. I've read a couple of
things you've written. Would you be willing to testify about this?
And I said yes, because I'm usually willing to walk
through any open door that's offered. So I traveled up there.

(02:33):
Prosecution objected, judge sided with the prosecution that it wasn't relevant,
and they sent me home. The case went on appeal
all up through the federal court system, and twelve years
later the Court's ruled I should have been able to testify,
but in the interim, a judge in Colorado decided this

(02:53):
kind of developmental testimony was relevant, and once it was
admitted in the court in Colorado, it became a sort
of precedent. So it's something that I didn't plan on
in my career. I sort of stumbled into interesting.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Seems to happen that way sometimes, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, let me.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Ask you this just had of curiosity. Have you ever
seen any of the work of Lawrence Steinberg.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yes, he's an old friend from graduate school. We both
went to Cornell, and his work has certainly been very
influential in the work that I've done in the forensic
arena involving youth both contemporaneous with the trials that they're
under or a lot of it is these resentencing of

(03:39):
guys who were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles,
and now after the Miller versus Alabama ruling in the
Supreme Court, they were eligible for resentencing hearings, and Larry
Steinberg's work has certainly was very instrumental to the Supreme
Court decision and certainly it's worked that I rely upon
very heavily.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, I would assume it seems like a corroborate a
lot of your findings from the earlier years. Fascinating stuff.
Now I remember, correctly you started talking to serial killers.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Correct. I have worked on a few serial killer cases,
you know, very a very small proportion of all killers
are serial killers. It's sort of a select group. But
there again, it wasn't something I set out to do,
but just working as an expert witness around the country
murder cases, I've sort of stumbled into several of those

(04:33):
as well.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
How were they different from the other killers? Is there
a distinction between them?

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Well, I mean there is some research on that. There's
an Australian woman who's done really one of the best
studies serial killers, including historically. She's used historical records to
go way back into the nineteenth century. You know they,

(05:00):
I would say, you know, the bulk certainly of young killers.
Young people commit murders. The murder arises out of a
social conflict. A lot of it is gang related, it
arises out of drug deals gone bad. Robbery's gone bad.
Seven to eleven, robbery's gone bad, Domestic conflicts. So the

(05:27):
serial killers are are different in the sense that there's
usually some guiding idea. It's a perverse idea, but some
guiding idea that runs across what they do. You know,
some of the differences probably is if you don't get
caught the first time you do this, you may do

(05:48):
it again. If you get caught the first time, that
may circumvent your career as a serial killer. For example,
I worked on the case of a boy. He was thirteen,
and through a long process that we don't have time for,
he had decided that his calling in life was to
become a serial killer, and it had a religious sort

(06:11):
of ideological religious idea that was going to drive him.
Then he decided that before he began his career, he
had to take care. He had to eliminate two people
who had disclosed this to, one of whom was his
best friend. Either was his sister. So he killed his
best friend to clear the decks for his career. But

(06:33):
he got caught before he killed his sister and moved
on to it. But had he not gotten caught for
the first one or killing his sister, I can really
see him just pursuing this this fixed idea in his
head that this was, you know, God's mission for him
was to commit these killings. In other cases, it's a
particularly kind of virulent conception of may woman in his life,

(07:01):
his mother, and then sort of replicating that over and
over and over again. So to me, that's that's probably
the biggest difference. That less situational, less sort of emotionally driven,
and more in this crazy sense, sort of a fixated idea.
It's crazy idea which sustains itself, becomes gratifying and compulsive.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
That's absolutely true. They get lost in those fantasy worlds
of theirs. How are the storied they are? I guess
the question I always get a lot of questions I
get is can they be rehabilitated? So you have somebody
like I mean, Ted Bunny is always the quintessential serio clip,
if I can phrase it that way. But then you
have Jeffrey Dahmer and other individuals, and as you mentioned,

(07:53):
they have this fixation on this idea or a fantasy
or whatnot. What's your take on that, and we'll go
looking at the other killers as well as we talked about.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, well, you know, one of the big decisions that
has to be made in sentencing, and the Supreme Court
recognizes about juveniles. You know, they said only the very
rarest of cases should be eligible for life without parole,
the cases where there is evidence that they are irrevocably corrupt,

(08:23):
which means that they can't be changed. And in my
book Miller's Children, for example, I deal with those rarest
of cases in a chapter called are there Exceptions? Because
that's the point, they are the exceptions. Most killers are
capable of rehability, excuse me, rehabilitation and transformation. When you

(08:45):
get somebody who's so profoundly damaged or who has this
sort of psychopathic quality.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
To them, you were saying, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
When you're dealing with somebody who is irreparably damaged or
has the psychopathic quality of total lack of empathy, total
lack of ability to connect with other people, the prognosis
for rehabilitation and transformation is very, very poor. I mentioned

(09:15):
this boy, you know, he was thirteen. It's one of
the rare cases where my conclusion was I couldn't imagine
how he could be rehabilitated and transformed, how you could
ever make him safe in the world. And that's a
pretty grim conclusion to come to. Particularly for a kid
who is now thirteen or fourteen.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Absolutely it is, and sometimes it's hard for people to
grasp because they don't get the idea that some individuals
just might be too foregone. I remember speaking to another
professor was also a forensic psychology professor, and he did
some consulting work, and he had a strange story I
have to share. The parents came up to him telling

(09:58):
him that they were worried about their son, who I
think was about sixteen years of age. They were saying
they were worried because he had he was torturing animals
and doing some other things I think fire setting, kind
of like the McDonald triad. But they didn't mention that
their bed wedding and then he got in then, but
then they mentioned casually or dismissively that he had raped

(10:22):
his sister for over a year, the younger sister and
the professor, and then they said, do you think he's
a danger to society? And the professor's kind of looked
at the parents, going do I think he's a danger.
He's already a danger to society. But his take was,
I don't even know if he can even bring him
back to normalcy because it was just so dramatic. I

(10:44):
don't know if it was a strange story. I don't
know if you have any comment on that.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, you know, generally, I think the conclusion or the
consensus is that with adult psychopaths, there's really no way
to make them have a normal emotion life. Now we
know that, you know, a significant number of adult psychopaths
don't end up getting arrested. You know. They For example,

(11:08):
the finding is that CEOs of corporations are three times
more likely than the general population to be psychopaths. But
they found a way to challenge that, to channel that
into a sort of pro social existence. The same is
true with some police officers, some military, some lawyers. So
there are sort of cultural niches in which some of

(11:31):
these people can can find a relatively safe home. Although
it may be destructive for society. It's not in the
conventional sense criminal. But the kids who take this path.
I think there's one study that found that they with
teenagers who were scoring high on this psychopath measure, that

(11:53):
they were able to pull them back to a more
normal range. But it required one on one therapy three
hours a day, six days a week for a year,
and that was intensive enough to sort of pull them
back into the human community in a way, because you know,
they were still teenagers, so they were still more malleable.

(12:16):
So I think that, you know, the default option with
people so damaged or so psychopathic is it's very rare
that you can do that, certainly once you get out
of adolescence.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
I guess it's scary society too, wouldn't it. You don't
want to be the one that makes the mistake of
saying he's fine and then he gets out and kills
I mean, India just released a serial killer last year
after twelve years. They thought he was rehabilitated, kind of
Edmund Kemper style, and then they release him and less
than three hours later he committed he killed somebody on

(12:49):
in a subway.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah, well, there's at least one study found that psychopaths
are more likely to get parolled than normal guys because
they're better at lie in a sort of forthright way
and manipulating. You know, there was a study in Canada
where they taught empathy skills to inmates and they thought
this would improve their relationships. Well, they when they analyze

(13:13):
the data it would sort of mix, no real clear effect.
So somebody said, what you got to do is separately
analyze the data for the psychopaths and the normals. And
for the normals the program worked. They became better at
relating to people. The psychopaths treated the program as a
workshop on how to improve your manipulations. Well, this is

(13:34):
always you know, people always think there's two kinds of
people in the world, but this is one of those
areas where you know that that's a useful sense knowing
who you're dealing with. And this is very different from
you know, people being diagnosed as sociopaths or with antisocial
personality disorder, which is more common than people who have psychopathy.

(13:57):
But it's sort of like social personality. So there's somebody
who they have a kind of non moral approach to
exploiting people or victimizing people. But they do tend to
have someone with some small group with whom they have
authentic relationships, and so it's a matter of extending their
circle out to include everybody else whereas psychopaths don't have anyone.

(14:21):
And I used to use this example. If you or
I'm presuming that neither of us is in that totally
irreparably corrupt category, if we walked into a room and
found a one hundred dollars bill on the floor, nobody
was around, we might say, well, okay, you know, I'll
take a hundred dollar bill. If we walked into a
room and we saw the one hundred dollar bill fall

(14:42):
out of someone's pocket, most people would say, well, obviously
you give it back to them, because it's clearly their money.
The sociopath says, now, hey, that's like walking to an
empty room. But if the sociopath walks into room and
his sister drops one hundred dollar and he says, well,
you're my sister, that that's your hundred dollars bill, you

(15:04):
keep it. The psychopath says, my sister drops one hundred
dollars bill, that's like being in an empty room. Nobody
counts for them. So that's an important distinction, and it's
one reason why you know, research shows that a lot
of the teenagers who look like they're going to be
diagnosed as sociopaths do get better, do rehabilitate, because they
have a kernel of sort of humanity that can be

(15:26):
built upon, as opposed to the psychopaths who really don't.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
That's a great example. I have to steal.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
It's the public domain.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
It's interesting too sociopathy. Psychopathy and sociopathy have not been
put into the DSM. We know, they just don't seem
to do it for some reason. This is lack of evidence.
So what do you think the deal is with that?

Speaker 3 (15:54):
You know, I don't really know. I don't follow it
very closely. When you go back to the original meaning
of psychoped it's moral insanity, and that really captures it
for me. It's the lack of a moral sense where
all relationships are instrumental, you know, And I don't know
quite why it doesn't make it into the DIASM as

(16:17):
I don't follow that very closely.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
The other thing is, you know, there may be families
that have a lot of craziness in them, and it
becomes a sort of subculture crazy. I'll give you a
very vivid example of that. I was working on a
case and I happened to go to the lawyer's office
the day when the psychiatrist's working in the case was

(16:40):
also there. And the lawyer said, well, I've got the
defendant's brother here. Would you like to talk with him?
So of course we said sure, So we talked about
the brother. Now the brother this is the brother who's
not in prison, not accused of anything. It explains to
us how he has an extended family hit list, which
is the order in which you plan to kill members

(17:00):
of his extended family. Really, that's what he said. But
then his next line was one of my most favorite
bizarre lines. The next words out of his mouth was,
but I'm not unreasonable, so I revised it every month.
So if you're nice to him, you move down on
the list. If you're mean to him, you move closer

(17:22):
to the top of the list. Wow. You know that's
the family from which the defendant who actually committed a
murder came. So you know, there is a lot of
sort of craziness out there. Mostly it doesn't get translated
into action. But you know, but this guy's walking around
with that idea in mind.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Just going to be a matter of time, I guess, hopefully.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Never possible, hopefully never.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, you know, I've always wondered about this question since
I have you here. That's a perfect question asked. You've
talked to a lot of different killers, You've seen the
developmental process, and I've done a lot of work and
the other individuals regards the drug car tills and we see.
There's a lot of different types of killers, right, as
you mentioned, there's situational killers, a lot of gang stuff.

(18:07):
Which is funny because a lot of times you see
the media and they'll do a lot of clickbait type
of headlines. You know, man kills, our team gets shot
and killed, but they never tell you it's a gang feud.
And I get why. But a lot of just misconstruing
think there's a bunch of people going around shooting each other,
but in reality, a lot of times it's just the gang, rivalry, territory, drugs,
whatever it is. But I guess my question would be,

(18:31):
do you see or have you seen distinctions when it
comes to individuals like in cartels where they have those cacarios,
the hitmen for the cartels or the mafia have their hitmen.
Are these just psychopaths for hire or these individuals that
they have no other choice? As a situational what do
you think?

Speaker 3 (18:47):
Well, you know, I think it's a mix. You know,
most situations are some an interaction between temperament, attributes to
the person has and the situation. You know, and back
during the Vietnam War, you know, there were, as there
are in almost every war there are massacres that happened

(19:09):
in the Vietnam War. The most famous one was this
Melai massacre where a bunch of normal, normal American young
Americans in the army went into this village and basically
killed everybody, raped the girls, shot everybody. Was a massacre.
When they tried to sort of disentangle that, I think
partly what they find is there is a gradual process

(19:33):
of depersonalization of the other. So, you know, you first
go in your first draft, did you go in the
army and you hear veterans talking about gooks with reference
to the Vietnamese, and it sort of, you know, it
takes you aback, you know, because that's a harsh term.
But then six months down the line, the same soldier
now is saying, well, you know, I might push around

(19:55):
a few goops, but I'd never shoot them, sort of
not realizing that they've already moved down that path, you know,
and at the end of that path is you know,
these are just goops and they're the enemy, and I
need retaliation for the fact they killed my buddy last week.
So I think there is that dynamic that can take
an initially normal person and turn them into what appears

(20:17):
to be this you know, sort of brutal, remorseless killer.
And I think in the cartelogy, do you have that
you also have the fact that some people are better
recruits for that than others. And then you have, you know,
you have this idea that people get in a situation
where they are brutalized and their brains adapt to that.

(20:39):
They become disconnected emotionally from what they're doing, and that
allows them to do things which may have a payoff
for them financially or socially or emotionally. So it's a
very troubling, complex thing. But if you start, you know,

(21:00):
you know the author Kurt Vonnegut and talked about I mean,
he wrote some things about war. He was a soldier
World War Two, and I remember him writing something about
recruiting soldiers. You don't need to look for psychopaths. You
can create psychopaths with your training. You can break down
all their inhibitions, break down and vision met killing. And

(21:22):
I think that social process explains a lot of it.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Fascinating, that's fascinating. He reminds me a little bit of that.
I think his name is Simon Baron Cohen. I'm going
to be interviewing him shortly you wrote a book on
the Science of evil.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Yes, yeah, he.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Was talking about the lack of empathy and I think
he even quoted I think it was Martin Bueber got
into Martin Bueber and the e end out. But the
deep personalization, as you just mentioned right now, was a
big component of it. And it's scary, right how quickly
it can be. We saw it with Lombardo. Yes, yeah,
it's amazing again.

Speaker 3 (21:59):
You know, there is there is that sort of generic
depersonalization leads to that, but there's also you know the
role of trauma in creating vulnerability. Now give you another
vivid example. Back in the fifties in Texas, there was
this horrible incident where this guy showed up with his son,

(22:21):
wanted to enroll them in the elementary school. Principal wouldn't
allow it for some technical reason. So the next day
the guy came back with dynamite and blew up the school,
you know, killed the principal and some other people. Now,
one part of the story is how primitive the response
to trauma was. They sent the kids back to school
within a couple of days. As I was told the story,

(22:43):
there were still body parts in some of the trees,
and they sent them back. So the journalist did a
follow up story, you know, like twenty years later of
the kids who had been in the school who'd been
through this, and some of them, you know, most of
them had led normal lives. Some of them were still
sort of echoing the horrible traumatic event. But he focused
on one kid in particular, who was so disoriented by

(23:05):
this trauma that he's just sort of lost, began to drift,
and by the time he was a teenager, he was
really just imagine, you know, a stereotype of a kid
who was just aimless, alienated and so on. And he
was befriended by a Protestant minister who took him under
his wing and eventually put him through college, put him

(23:26):
through medical school, so he became a doctor, you know,
a great success story. The only problem was this this
preacher was James Jones, who started the Jonestown community and
if you remember, you know that ended with this mass
death alter poison. The doctor who prepared and administered the
poison was this kid from that bomb explosion. And then

(23:51):
so you know, he was socialized. Somebody gave him meaning
to his life. And purpose and structure, but it turned
out to be malevolent the structure that he was brought into.
So it's a horrible sort of worst case scenario of
how trauma could make you vulnerable to a certain pathway.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Are going to take me down another rabbit hole. Now
we're heading over to the world of trauma. But before
we get to the world of traumas, I do want
to ask you a little bit about the Youngian theory
and the shadow having to confront our shadow and see
if that applies at all to what your work is
doing here, because I know you talk about emotional and
moral damage and I want to explain on that a

(24:31):
little bit if we have some time again, folks, James Garbarino,
you can see the books right here, Miller's Children, Listening
to Killers as a book, number two, number three is
Lost Boys. You can get them all on Amazon dot com,
really fascinating reads. You're on the Doctor Carlos Crime Network,
so you can't get a better place to learn about
these books and get more insight on these topics. So, Professor,

(24:55):
I guess my first question for the other questions, when
you add the sexual component to does that change anything
for those individuals?

Speaker 3 (25:03):
You think, well, I think anything that magnifies the arousal,
you know, is important to understand. And you know, sexual
dimension is by definition an issue of arousal. But I
think fear rage. You know, if you look, for example,

(25:23):
at I've worked on cases where there's multiple stabbings. You know,
you can shoot somebody in a sort of casual way,
but to stab somebody multiple times requires an extreme mobilization
of energy. And so you often are looking for something,
you know, what mobilize that kind of energy to sustain

(25:44):
stabbing somebody thirty five times. And you know, one of
the most reliable sources of that kind of rage is
boys who were abandoned by their mothers, and that the loss,
the rage, the sadness that that can produce, you know,
can become mobilized later on. I mean, for example, the

(26:07):
boy who his mother serially abandoned him in throughout childhood.
By the time he was twelve, she showed up again
and said, I want to be your mother. You know.
She persuaded the foster mother to bring him to visit,
which she did a couple of times. After I think
the third visit, she said, well, bring your bicycle over
so you'll feel you know, at home here, which he did.

(26:27):
The next time he comes over, she's gone. And not
only that, but she sold his bicycle. And somehow that
sticks in my mind that you know, can we imagine
the rage and sadness as would produce? All right, So
he's twelve, Fast forward to when he's twenty two. He's
now living with a woman who is the same age
as his mother, not the same age difference, but the

(26:48):
actual age of his mother. And they have a five
year relationship which is very stormy, in which he keeps
threatening to abandon her. Okay, so obviously that's sort of reflecting.
And then Fani, they get into an argument over whether
they were going to spend some money for drugs or food.
I think she pulls out a knife, which she grabs

(27:09):
and then stabs her thirty five times. So it doesn't
seem like a very sophisticated psychological analysis. Who is he
really stabbing?

Speaker 2 (27:16):
You know?

Speaker 3 (27:17):
So that wasn't sexual That was you know, this rage
about abandonment. So I think sexuality, abandonment, any of these
other highly arousing things can be the key emotional component.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Interesting, fascinating stuff. I can keep you here all day, right,
So let's go back to your books and in the
last few minutes together listening to killers, what was some
of the biggest takeaways? That was always the most difficult question.
But what are some of the most biggest takeaways you
want to listeners to know about your book?

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Well, I think one thing is that I always find
that the first thing I have to do is find
some common human ground between me and this guy. I say, guys,
mostly guys, there's some women, because until we do that,
I don't feel like I'm likely to get an authentic

(28:11):
expression of how they view the world. And sometimes you
know this. I mean one guy I remember, you know,
he woke up one day at age forty, pulled out
his ak forty seven and killed his wife and two children,
two stepchildren, just obliterated them. He had dissociated amnesia from it,
which meant he couldn't remember who did it, which meant
he didn't think he'd be convicted because I figured eventually

(28:34):
he said, they'll find whoever broke into my house and
killed my family, you know, but he had done it.
So I was thinking, how do you start to build
a human connection with this guy? So what I did was,
when I walked in, I said to him. Look, I
just want to say, at this at the outset, how
sorry I am for your loss, because from his point
of view, so his family had been murdered. Yeah, and

(28:56):
once I said that, he sort of teared up and
he said, you know, nobody's ever said that to me before.
And then he was much more forthcoming about his life
and his inner life than he would have been otherwise.
So that, I think is one thing that I learned
over those first twenty years, that finding some human common ground.

(29:17):
And I think the next thing is that developmental psychology
has a lot to bring to bear on these issues
which clinical psychology typically doesn't. For example, impair detachment relationships
early in life and set the stage for certain kinds
of violence. And it's really a developmental phenomenon. So those

(29:41):
might be two things at least that come to mind
right away.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Wonderful stuff. I completely agree with you too. Doing my
own research right now, developmental the relationship between developmental psychology
and neurobiology and criminal behavior is really fascinating to see it.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Yeah, that's the real, you know, frontier that's being developed
right now.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I can see why. I can see why.
I mean, Freud's giving a thumbs up wherever he's at,
let me ask you this, and so is young Actually
Miller's Children tell us a little bit about the takeaway
from Miller's Children.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
Well, Miller's Children was really important for me to write
because so much of what I've been working on all
these years was so in a sense depressing. You're working
on death penalty cases where the best outcome is life
in prison. You're working on trying to figure out these
horrible crimes. Miller's Children was about teenagers who committed murders

(30:39):
and now, twenty years later, who were they now? And
it was really kind of inspiring because you can see
how they'd been written off as losers, as violent, as corrupts,
dangerous at sixteen seventeen, and now twenty two years later,
they're turning forty and they're not just rehability, but they're

(31:01):
transformed often into you know, marvelous human beings. And so
it's very uplifting for me to see these changes, which
you wouldn't have seen if you just look at them
as a teenager. It was, you know, that was very discouraging,
but to see the change over usually that's one reason
why you know, I came up with this idea that
the optimal developmental sentence for most of these guys is

(31:25):
twenty years. It's sort of ten years to get to
a mature brain at about twenty five or twenty six,
and then ten years to use that mature brain for
the process of rehabilitation. So my bottom line was, if
you can't If if they're the murder they committed as
a teenager is not the result of a transient adolescent

(31:46):
crisis which can be resolved relatively quickly, if it's the
result of a build up of trauma and social toxicity
and all the rest of it, then to just sentence them,
for example, to ten years maybe the worst outcome. Indeed,
there was a study in Florida that look the teenage
killers who were sentenced to ten years, and the recidivism
rate was like ninety five percent.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
Whereas the studies that have said that came out for
guys re sentenced under Miller versus Alabama, where they had
twenty years of sentence, the recidism rate was essentially zero.
And that made such developmental sense to me that until
you have the mature brain, it's like you got one
hand tied behind your back, and then now you now
you got two hands, you know, to work on, to

(32:30):
work on this, and particularly if they have at least
average intellectual ability, if they have all the components of resilience,
and particularly if they had some positive stuff in childhood
to you know, to draw upon, to build upon, they
could really do this. You know, we use the term rehabilitation.
A guy once said to me in prison, how can

(32:51):
I become rehabilitated when I was never habilitated in the
first place. And it's very insightful because what he was saying,
I had nothing. I had to start from scratch, you know,
to become a decent human being. Where somebody else will say,
you know, there was always my grandma and how bad
things got. You know, she took care of me. She

(33:11):
cared for me. And they can go back and sort
of build that and use that as a foundation. So
those are a couple of things that I think really
came out of Miller's children.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff, and it's so true. And I
guess one thing that always stands true for me. I
always tell this to everybody when I do lectures and
stuff is life isn't simple. Complex people try to make
it simple but it really isn't. And I can see
just be talking to you today, so many different types

(33:43):
of killers, with so many different situations. It's just not
that you can't do a blanket sentence for anybody.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah, when I you know the intellectual framework I come
to my work is it's called ecological perspective, which at
its root says, if the question is does X cause y,
the answer is it depends destrating But true. That's right.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, thank you so much again for spending some time
with us today.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Doctor, Thank you, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
I was great having you here, folks again, Doctor James
Garbarino the books Miller's Children while giving teenagers a second
chance manas for all of us teenage killers a second
chance master, all of us. Number two is listening to
killers lessons learned for my twenty years as a psychological
expert witness in murder cases and number three Lost Boys
where our sons turned violent and how we can see

(34:37):
the fabulous reads. Hey, folks, seven days a week, eleven
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