The Universal Fascination With Criminals and Crime

Whenever a bizarre, horrifying, or seemingly out-of-character crime occurs, the human mind is baffled and wants to make sense out of something that seems senseless. Who is the perpetrator? What drove him to commit the crime? Why that particular crime? And so forth.

Some people find the details of the crime itself, no matter how gruesome, exciting and fascinating. Mainly, however, the puzzle that viewers or readers want to solve is to fathom the mentality of the criminal.

For most people, it is unimaginable to think of themselves taking someone’s life. It is not in their nature. They can understand that greed, jealousy, revenge, and so forth may result in people reacting in dire ways. But to actually slaughter innocent people is something they do not understand.

My work during the past 50 years is to understand the criminal mind. The conventional wisdom, which is still alive and well, is that terrible circumstances drive people “over the edge” to commit terrible acts. But that is usually not the case.

Criminals come from all segments of society. Their siblings, neighbors, and others who come from the same backgrounds as they do not commit these grisly acts. There is more to the story than environment. In many cases, there seems to be something pathological about the minds of the perpetrators. Are they sick or evil?

Everyone has faced intense stress, bad luck, unfair treatment, and so forth. But they deal with problems differently. They may identify with the criminal’s situation but are at a loss to understand how he reacts. They struggle to understand the differences between themselves and perpetrators of crimes that they would never consider committing. Identifying with the plight of the criminal, they do not identify with the act.

Many criminals are highly intelligent. Some are very talented. They may profess to be deeply religiously observant. And they can be very sentimental. The paradoxical nature of the criminal is intriguing. Think of the man who murdered a girlfriend but refused to step on a spider because he didn’t want to kill a living thing. Consider a one-man crime wave who committed hundreds of property and sex offenses but still considered himself a good person. Within the criminal reside maudlin sentiment and savage brutality. “I can change from tears to ice,” commented one offender.

The criminal mind offers an eternal puzzle no matter whether one approaches it from the standpoint of the forensic investigator, the clergyman, the psychologist, or the reader of a crime novel.

Except for a small number of people who may be criminals themselves, there is no interest in copying the crime. The interest is in how the crime is enacted, the motivation behind it, the criminal’s machinations as he tries to avoid detection, and how he tries to outfox the system if he is apprehended.

The criminal mind has been a subject of fascination forever. With an increasing number of television shows, streaming features, and instant communication by the news media, there is a lot more to watch than ever before. Human nature does not change. But the opportunities to watch crime-related programming do.