[The Madcap]

I’m not talking about people who rob stores or are charged with petty crimes, I’m talking about the big ones. . I was looking through the DEA’s most wanted and I was filled with so much anger and hatred for those people, and I saw a video of a big criminal organization kidnapping someone and it sickened me with anger. I usually try to stay clear of that stuff, but I felt this overwhelming sense of wanting to do something about it, helping the helpless.. I wish I had the powers of a god to just get rid of those types of people. I just need to know that there are others out there who feel the same way.

[Yaowen]

Dear TheMadcap,

Having been a victim of crime, I can definitely identify with your sentiments. What can take just a few seconds can end up destroying the lives of so many people. It is pretty sickening and shocking.

I try to temper any rage I feel with understanding or attempts at understanding so as not to be consumed by negative feelings that only end up hurting me in the long run.

Criminals, in my experience in the criminal justice system don't think of themselves as criminals by and large. Consciously or unconsciously they feel they have been wronged by people in their past or by society or others and they want revenge. In their twisted thinking there is a lot of totally mixed up logic. A child who is bullied at home might take it out on an innocent student in school. A kid who was wronged as a child might get revenge twenty years later on a totally innocent person.

Most people can understand revenge. Someone is mean to you and you give them the silent treatment or yell at them. A neighbor who feels wronged can do some mean and petty things in their neighbors yard. Lots of instances of petty revenge.

Some people who see themselves, rightly or wrongly as having suffered some grave injustice can lash out at innocent people with shocking violence totally out of proportion to anything. A lot of criminals think that the "system" has cheated them and therefore they have the right to cheat the system back. To them it isn't a crime. In their minds it is justice, as twisted as that may be.

And then there are the psychopaths and sociopaths who seem unexplainable, those who begin as children by torturing animals and then move of to crimes against humanity. There are the homicidal dictators who decree genocide or mass executions of their so-called enemies or launch campaigns of forced starvation and end up being responsible for the destruction of tens of millions of men, women and children.

Almost any child can have an explosive temper tantrum. But adults can have explosive temper tantrums that result in unbelievably shocking violence.

Society has to control those with such violent antisocial tendencies if they can not or will not control themselves. But justice is imperfect. Justice might punish a violent felon but cannot restore what was lost, cannot restore a lost life. When you lose someone you love to a violent criminal, even if they are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or capital punishment, that does not bring back your loved one. Justice here on earth is almost a shadow of what perfect justice would be: the complete restoration of things as they were before the crime. But you work with what you've got.

I have forgiven the person who harmed me and my family. But I understand those who will not and cannot forgive and those who feel forgiveness is wrong.

I suspect that the person who harmed me went through a lot of bad things and lost it. Obviously they had many opportunities to improve their character, to work on curbing their temper and their baser instincts, to work on being less impulsive. Maybe they have reasons why this didn't happen. I don't see any point in hating this person because the hate ultimately harms me and makes me continue on as a victim. I leave the ultimate judging of this person to God Who will know what was evil and malice and what was circumstances and situation.

To this day I cannot watch true crime shows on television. It is too painful for me. The shows are geared to those who like to have a hand in solving real life mysteries but I do not find these shows to be mysteries. I find them to be really sad, horribly, horribly sad. Someone has lost their life and often in an orgy of violence and brutality that is shocking beyond words . . . lost their lives in a cruel and heartless and savage way.

There is a growing body of evidence that the brains of psychopaths are anatomically different than normal brains. The differences have been seen in several studies utilizing brain scans and post-mortem examinations.

Newer studies using live real-time functional imagining techniques have seemed to find that these anatomical defects have physiological results. fMRI scans of the brains of psychopaths and sociopaths show clear differences in regional cerebral blood flow and energy utilization [glucose metabolism] that is quite startlingly different from that of normal brains.

Of course all scientific research is subject to caveats [length of study, duration of study, objectivity of study, quality of study, confounding factors, new discoveries and so on]. But perhaps there is some physical component of psychopathy and sociopathy. Who knows.

As a victim myself, I understand anger at criminals from the inside. I also understand it as someone who can empathize with those poor souls who are often tortured and brutally destroyed sometimes for a small sum of money or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is really tragic.

Sincerely yours, Yao Wen