Julia Shaw: prediction

Transcript context

…And again, again, this idea of heroic imagination, actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching, they’re drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries to help. You mentioned 70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder, and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%. So that raises the question, why do people commit murder? Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it’s perpetrated for reasons that we don’t like as a society. So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows, who don’t necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology, let’s just say, and who come at you with myths where you go, “Oh, no, we’re not, we’re not going to talk about that. We’re not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.” I hate that. That’s one of my least favorite sort of… The trauma narrative of all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood, I think, is really problematic. What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it’s really boring, is it’s a fight that gets out of control. And if you look at the real reasons stated, it’s things like, “This person owed me $4, and so I killed him. This person stole my bike. This person owed me…” It’s these really stupid reasons, and it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument, and it wasn’t planned. It’s not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person. And we don’t like that because there’s something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator, there’s a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family. So the victim loses a life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that… At best, right? If you will, in terms of justice. But they don’t have the same kinds of consequences, and we don’t like that. We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons. And so that’s why I think there’s this real desire to show serial killers and to show people who are, in fact, planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them rather than this fight that goes out of control or someone drink-driving, or someone who is… I mean, unfortunately, intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common, one of the top four reasons for murder as well. But that’s not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news. So I think it’s always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual. Very few people want to murder. They might fantasize about it, but they don’t want to go through with it. And very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again. I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that’s justice, which is, sure, that’s one version where it’s, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, life for life. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that’s justice, which is, sure, that’s one version where it’s, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, life for life. There’s obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don’t adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, well, you stole somebody else’s life, so you don’t deserve to have one. But there’s also the other side, which is if we’re looking at prevention, murder is really… Like, they’re not going to… People aren’t going to go out and murder again. So that is… That’s a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence. And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer, and they’re in line more just with how we perceive justice to work. So there are big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.…

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