Reading the article in the New Yorker, by Seabrook, about psychopathy, I was interested in finding out the way the people with this condition are being treated. While searching for information I came upon video on someone who was in prison with psychopathy. A man who committed manslaughter and robbery is now trying to convince people that he is okay and is now trying to get back into society.
This raises the question about the way in which we treat this condition. I feel that much of society looks at it as deviant behavior because it is out of the norm how we “ought to act” then classifies it as criminal. I agree with what this video states that we need to change the way in which we treat them. Most of our prisons try to suppress their anxiety; however they need to change the way they think and how to change their behavior, whether it’s by group therapy or by social interaction like we see in the video.
According to the article in the New Yorker psychopaths‘s main defect is a serve emotional detachment, defined as a lack of empathy and remorse. So doesn’t the prison system make you feel more emptiness and a greater remorse? So the point made in the article is how the justice system viewed them as criminals, but is not their fault, it is the way their minds work.
This video states that we can’t view psychopaths as criminals we must treat them differently and maybe we will see some progress in treating people with this condition, and maybe some can improve enough to function in society.
Centuries from now we are going to look at this age with the same eye that we look at pre-modern societies. How could in the year 2011 they still taught that “labeling” and separating human beings into asylums was productive in figuring out a solution. That is tomorrow where solutions are already apparent, but we do not have that luxury today. Today what we can do is lock them up in prisons and hope that time places the added effect of fossiling and crumbling their violent tendencies. Society says that there is something wrong with them, that they must suppress the things that seem natural to their character. Society says it is due to a lack of empathy a type of people that lack emotional inhibitors that stop certain actions. They flourish in spaces called prisons, yet we forget them in the rhetoric of business, our new global conquest system. Business practices today is our new forms of violent conflict, of colonization and ideas of efficiency. Lack of an emotion here creates a hyper efficient entity whose ends justifies the means, the nature of a killer yet without all the stigma…with much more romantic associations. Not only that deviancy of this kind has a lot to do with societal, economic pressures that places certain groups in a certain niche. A black boy born to a single mother in Brooklyn versus the white boy with both parents who grows up in an affluent neighborhood, both a psychopath; and a few years time we can see who might become the deviant of society.