Does crime fiction contribute to violence?

By Sandra Parshall
 
Benjamin LeRoy, publisher of the independent press Tyrus Books, worries that the hardboiled crime fiction he publishes may be contributing to gratuitous violence in American society. He is addressing his own concern by moving Tyrus away from offering crime fiction exclusively and introducing  general titles among its 10 annual frontlist publications.

LeRoy said in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly that the change was inspired by the string of mass shootings in American schools and public places. “I look at what we’re doing, what we’re saying. What are we putting out there in the public consciousness?” he told PW. “I’ve always been fascinated with how fiction is a reflection of the times we live in. It’s something I’ve wrestled with: if what we’re publishing, if what we’re putting out there, contributes to this gratuitous violence.”

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, the four-year-old press is a division of F+W Media. It has 60 books in print, and a number of its crime novels have been nominated for and won awards. However, its bestselling book to date, with 20,000 copies sold, is neither a mystery nor crime fiction but a 2011 “literary noir” novel, Untouchable by Scott O’Connor, which explores the impact of a woman’s death on her husband and son. LeRoy wants to diversify still further, while continuing to publish novels about “people who are outcasts, struggling to understand who they are, where they’re going, and what they’re going to do.”

Tyrus recently released Graphic the Valley by Peter Hoffmeister, a coming-of-age novel with an environmental theme. LeRoy says Graphic the Valley has persuaded him to spend more time outdoors enjoying nature. In November Tyrus will publish children’s book author Betsy Franco’s first adult novel, Naked, described as a magical realism fable inspired by the life and death of sculptor Camille Claudel.

This new direction for Tyrus, and LeRoy’s concern about crime fiction contributing to real-life violence, haven’t received much attention in the mystery community. If Tyrus had a bigger footprint in the publishing world, LeRoy’s comments would undoubtedly be the subject of a lot of discussion among writers and editors. But doesn’t he raise valid questions about what we’re doing? Should we ignore those questions just because Tyrus publishes 10 books a year?

Where do you think crime fiction fits into our society? Do novels featuring graphic violence (usually against women) desensitize us to real-life murder? Do cozies that make light of murder persuade readers that killing can be clean and lots of fun, with no lasting consequences?

How much responsibility do writers and publishers bear for the effect of our books on readers?

Does lead poisoning cause violence?

by Sandra Parshall

Although society seems to be reeling from the worst violence in history, the truth is that crime rates in the U.S. have dropped steadily since peaking around 1990.

Politicians and law enforcement agencies are happy to take the credit. Then-mayor of New York Rudy Guiliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton basked in praise when the city saw the sharpest drop in crime since the end of Prohibition. But did their get-tough policies bring about the change, or was something less obvious happening, not just in New York but across the country?

For years I’ve read off and on about scientific studies showing a link between high levels of lead in the environment and violent crime, and corresponding drops in crime when people were exposed to less lead. Yet no government body, certainly no law enforcement agency, has shown an interest in the possibility that lead poisoning is the cause of a lot of criminal behavior.

The correlation between lead exposure and crime looks strong in the statistics. For decades, the single greatest source of lead in the environment was auto exhaust. As children who were exposed to lead grew to adolescence and young adulthood, the violent crime rate increased. The phase-out of leaded gasoline in the U.S. began in 1973. When children born in the 1970s and after began to mature twenty years later, in the early 1990s, the crime rate started to decline. The turnaround has happened not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Finland, and West Germany, all countries that quickly and dramatically reduced the amount of lead that vehicles spewed into the air through their exhaust pipes.

The January-February 2013 issue of Mother Jones magazine has a comprehensive report on the lead-crime connection, written by investigative journalist Kevin Drum. The article contains documented information that every American, and especially those with children and grandchildren, should pay attention to, because our environment still contains far too much lead. This isn’t a matter of politics. It’s simply a question of what we’re willing to do to protect children from the brain damage lead causes – permanent, incurable damage that can result in violent behavior and uncontrollable impulses.

Scientists have long known that eating chips of lead paint causes brain damage in children – lower IQ levels, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and juvenile delinquency as the children aged. In the 1990s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development decided it might be a good idea to remove lead paint from old houses, and they hired Rick Nevin as a consultant on the costs and benefits of this massive project.

Nevin followed the link between the metal and brain damage beyond paint to a far greater source of lead in the environment: gasoline. Lead isn’t a natural part of gasoline. General Motors invented tetraethyl lead in the 1920s as an additive to prevent pinging and knocking in engines. After World War II the auto industry boomed, and soon children all over the country were breathing in lead every day. Tetraethyl is doubly dangerous because, unlike the lead in paint and pipes, it’s easily absorbed through the skin. In the 1960s, twenty years after the auto boom began, crime levels started rising dramatically. The crime wave continued until the early 1990s, twenty years after the phase-out of leaded gas began.

Rick Nevin presented the results of his research in a 2000 paper, laying out  detailed evidence of the correlation between lead and criminal behavior. Children who were exposed to high levels of lead in the 1940s and 1950s were indeed more likely to become violent criminals in the period between the 1960s and 1990.

Nevin’s findings, published in the journal Environmental Research, were ignored by government bodies and law enforcement.

Nevin wasn’t the only researcher looking into the topic, though. Harvard graduate student Jessica Wolpaw Reyes investigated the connection between lead and violence for her dissertation in the late 1990s and came to the same conclusion Nevin had. She carried it further, and learned that in states where lead-free gasoline was quickly accepted, the rate of violent crime committed by young adults declined rapidly a couple of decades later. In  states where consumers were slow to begin using lead-free gasoline, the drop in crime was slower.

More recently, other researchers have published studies demonstrating the link between lead and violence at the local, state, national and international levels. “Put all this together,” Kevin Drum says in his Mother Jones article, “and you have an astonishing body of evidence.”

Using a new generation of neurological scanners, researchers have also documented the ways in which lead damages the human brain and nervous system. Lead poisoning can cause a permanent loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with reasoning, mental flexibility, attention, emotional regulation, and control of impulses and aggression.

Of course, not all crime is caused by lead poisoning, and not all of us who were exposed to lead as children (I am in that group myself) turned into violent adults. Drum points out that almost everyone in the U.S. over the age of 40 was exposed to excessive lead while growing up, and most of us probably suffered no more than the loss of a few IQ points. But millions of children already living on the margin of emotional and physical health were vulnerable to lead’s most devastating effects.

Why have criminologists, public authorities, and law enforcement agencies ignored the mountains of evidence that lead poisoning causes violent behavior? Every expert wants to explain violence in terms of his own expertise. A psychologist looks into the offender’s background for a psychological explanation. Politicians blame lax law enforcement or the  booming trade in illegal drugs. And so on. None of the criminology experts Drum contacted showed the slightest interest in the lead hypothesis.

In any case, auto fuel and house paints no longer contain lead, so the problem is solved, right? No. As Drum points out, millions of houses with leaded paint remain in the U.S., and the lead can be released to do more harm during remodeling. Airplane fuel still consists of as much as 60% tetraethyl. Small plane exhaust, by some accounts, contributes at least half of the lead remaining in our air. The lead that cars vented into the air for decades is still with us, absorbed into the soil beneath our feet. The soil our food is grown in. The soil children play on in parks. Tetraethyl, invented to stop car engines from making annoying sounds, lives on as a toxin  everywhere in our environment.

The Lead Safe America Foundation advises that if you live in an old house or neighborhood, you and your children should be tested for lead levels. If you want to renovate an old house, find out how to do it safely – or, better yet, hire a company whose workers are trained to remove lead paint.  

The cost of lead abatement nationwide would be staggering, and that, in the end, may be the reason no one wants to face the dangers of leaving it in place.

Drum concludes, “This is the choice before us: We can either attack crime at its root by getting rid of the remaining lead in our environment, or we can continue our current policy of waiting 20 years and then locking up all the lead-poisoned kids who have turned into criminals... Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.”

Mother Jones, the January-February issue: buy it and read Kevin Drum’s full report. I’ve touched on only a fraction of it here.

Violence at Home

by Julia Buckley
I live with a man and two boys (but in some ways three boys). Each day they spend a good half hour mimicking scenes of extreme violence just for the fun of it. There are lots of gun sounds (really elaborate ones that I can't make, and couldn't make when I was a kid, either); there are long periods of wrestling on the floor, during which they yell things like, "You're already dead! I killed you when you walked in the room!" and "No way--I deflected it with the pillow" or, alternately, "I jumped out of the way and it ricocheted off the wall!"

Today while I was trying to have a serious adult conversation with my husband Jeff, my ten-year-old ran in the room, touched his father, and then left again, closing the door behind him. Jeff started laughing. "What was that?" I asked, my mind still on the bills.

"He put a grenade in my pocket and locked us in," he said proudly.

We could hear my son giggling in the living room.

Still other times they like to call out movie cliches while they practice their stylized violence. Today my oldest son, grappling with his father, yelled, "Why kill me? It will be pointless once the Wisnewski files come out!"

Their dad tried to escape into the bathroom, but I heard our youngest opening the door of that once-private place. "Graham!" I yelled. "Leave your father alone while he's in there."

Graham peeked into my office, all innocence. "I was just shooting a couple of poisoned darts into him," he said, shrugging.

Geez. Why can't a girl understand? My sons think I am a major square with no sense of humor, especially when I call a halt to the violent play. My oldest has already informed me that not only am I not cool, but I am "meaner" than the other mothers he has observed.

Even if I wanted to join in their manly fun, I wouldn't be able to, because I just don't get it. This is a club to which I don't have membership. I'm mostly content to watch them from the sidelines the way I would watch a strange animal behavior at the zoo.

Their need for violent play is entirely separate from violence itself. My sons are still shocked by real violence, but this false stuff is as old as the hills. The reason their fantasies must include elaborate weaponry and faux wrestling might just be wired into their brains, and it's as difficult for them to explain as it is for me to comprehend.

I just think of the way rams slam into each other, locking horns for no apparent reason, and assume that there is a parallel in the human world.

Teens, Violence, and American Malaise

by Julia Buckley
My son is walking around the house with a toy gun, stalking his brother in the time-honored fashion. His round head and angelic face make him look like a Precious Moments figurine, but his commando stealth and narrowed eyes hint at the dreams of a soldier. In one sense I see this as a tradition: my own brothers often maintained amicable conflicts in their teen years--mainly a celebration of violence and testosterone which sometimes had them grappling on the floor of my mother's clean kitchen.

But my brothers didn't have access to all that boys have access to today: violent video games, far more violent movies, violent songs, violent images. According to this USA today article, school shootings are increasing because violence among young people is increasing.

Reasons for this phenomenon are complex: lack of parents at home, more access to guns, a belief that guns solve problems--those are some offered by the psychologists interviewed in the article. Added to these social realities is the very new notion of wanting to be famous for any reason--a sort of AMERICAN IDOL and reality tv-inspired idea that fame is something one deserves and can demand in whatever way necessary.

Naturally I look at my "normal" sons and worry that they, too, are affected by the violence. They used to play really sweet video games about animals escaping from the zoo, or little astronauts landing flying saucers on the moon; but now that they're a teen and an adolescent, they've decided that the only "cool" games are the ones which involve guns and lots of shooting. Like the people who say they read PLAYBOY for the articles, my sons suggest that they like these games for the realistic scenery, the amazing special effects.

But the reality is that they like the violence and the power they feel with the joystick in their hands--so close, really, to wielding a real gun. The violence doesn't end with the game, because they pretend to shoot each other all day. We warn them, we complain about their behavior, we threaten them. But they can't resist the lure of being powerful, even in play. Perhaps the only way to really address it would be to wean them off the games, which are their favorite things in the world.

If we did lose the games, though, they could always turn to the internet for their doses of violence, or the movies--even PG rated ones--which seem to be so much more violent than they once were.

According to the USA Today, this is distinctly an American issue. Perhaps before we address why our children are fascinated by violence, we will have to address why we adults are.

It is ironic, I know, that I like to write tales about murder and I'm quibbling over the kind of killing that fascinates my children. Perhaps we're all drawn to the notion of murder because of the power dynamic behind it, which in itself provides good drama.

But if in fact we are becoming more violent than we once were, is the violence a symptom of a larger illness? What makes it distinctly American? Are we any different now from the raw and violent America that rose in defiance of its motherland?

Why are so many people in prison?

Sandra Parshall


Did you know that one out of every 31 adults in the U.S. is either in prison or jail or on supervised release from incarceration?

That startling statistic is in an article by Senator James Webb of Virginia that appeared in last Sunday’s Parade Magazine. I don’t usually regard this newspaper supplement as a source of sociological wisdom, but Webb’s piece is worth every citizen’s attention. Reform of the criminal justice system and our overburdened prisons is one of his keenest interests, and he has the facts, supplied by the Department of Justice, to back up his call for change.

The prison population in this country is up to 2.3 million. Another 5 million adults are on probation, parole, or other correctional supervision. The U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its prisoners – 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, almost five times the worldwide rate of 158 per 100,000. As Webb says, “Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different – and vastly counterproductive.”

What we’re doing differently is putting a lot of people in prison for relatively minor and nonviolent offenses. According to the DOJ, fully one-third of all prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Almost half of all drug arrests in 2007 involved marijuana rather than “hard” drugs. Almost 60% of those imprisoned for drug offenses have no history of violence or involvement in major drug sales. Four out of five drug arrests are for possession; only one in five is for dealing. While marijuana users are serving prison sentences, the Mexican cartels that bring drugs across our borders and into our communities, at an estimated annual profit of $25 billion, flourish unimpeded, and gangs from other parts of Latin America, Asia, and Europe are getting in on the action. Imprisoning users does nothing to stem the drug trade.

Our prisons are overcrowded and dangerous. People who commit offenses that other countries would treat as medical, mental, or social problems are thrown into institutions where violence is a constant threat and diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis are rampant. Being caught with even a small amount of an illegal drug is enough to ruin a person’s entire future, if he survives prison. According to the DOJ, more than 350,000 adult prisoners are mentally ill. This is some of what we’re getting for the $68 billion we spend on corrections in this country every year.

Some state governments are beginning to realize that their corrections systems have to be fixed – if only because state budgets can’t continue to fund ever-increasing prison populations. Last week, Gov. David Patterson of New York announced plans to roll back harsh sentences for nonviolent offenses. Across the country, leaders are pushing sentencing reform to reduce prison populations and costs. Of course, opponents claim that this amounts to coddling criminals and that we must build more prisons.

Senator Webb proposes a national commission that would take a comprehensive approach to corrections reform and provide guidance to states dealing with overburdened prisons and court systems. Like so many other problems we face in this country, the chaos in our prisons seems overwhelming, and plenty of people will throw up their hands and say it can’t be fixed. But it must be fixed, whether at the federal level or state by state. We can’t look the other way and allow this mess to get worse.

What approach do you favor? Do you believe nonviolent offenders should be given lighter sentences, or probation and community service instead of prison terms?

Do you believe nonviolent offenders should be incarcerated with those convicted of violent crimes?

Do you think drug use should be treated as a crime or a medical problem?

Do you believe marijuana use should be decriminalized?

Read Senator Webb’s article here:
http://www.parade.com/news/2009/03/why-we-must-fix-our-prisons.html