Using Murder by Philip Jenkins

Author:Philip Jenkins [Jenkins, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, True Crime, Murder, General
ISBN: 9780202305257
Google: hYahu6G0tZAC
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1994-01-15T03:28:04+00:00

Contemporary views of serial murder have not quite espoused Lombrosan or biomedical beliefs, although Norris (1988) has ventured some distance in this direction.

Stasio (1989) has remarked how frequently moralistic and law-and-order themes occur in recent novels on serial murder, where police characters in particular use the offense as a vehicle for attacks on rehabilitation, social theories of crime, and moral relativism in general. In The Silence of the Lambs, it is Hannibal Lecter himself who rejects Clarice Starling’s attempts to find what made him a killer: “Nothing happened to me Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil?” (p. 21).

The implications of this moralistic approach are suggested by the response of conservative columnist Cai Thomas to the Dahmer case (Thomas 1991). Thomas, a leader of the Moral Majority, drew an extended comparison between the recent event and the Corll affair, which he had covered as a journalist in 1973. His basic theme was reflected in his title, which asserted, “Serial murders underscore evil’s presence.” Such affairs illustrated the role of genuine spiritual evil in crime causation, “not an admission that our sophisticated culture usually accepts.” Evil implied individual responsibility and theories of punishment based on retribution and deterrence. Reform and rehabilitation were essentially mythical, and “that is why we need prisons and capital punishment—to protect us from evil.” “A better case for the death penalty could hardly be found” than Jeffrey Dahmer. Though there is no explicit reference here to the homosexual content of both cases, Thomas’s writings have long denounced homosexual activities and organized gay rights movements, and it is likely that readers are meant to draw the conclusion that this is one critical aspect of the evil he denounces.

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