Criminal Minds and Csi

Essay #1

With common TV crime shows like Criminal Minds and CSI, society believes that serial killers are around everywhere. However, it is quite the opposite. Serial killers are brilliant because they can stay hidden and cover their tracks to never be caught. Therefore, a lot of unsolved murders could be done by serial killers but we will never know. What creates these people to turn into killers? Serial killers are capable of such gruesome crimes because they are born as psychopaths and withstand unpleasant childhoods.

Psychopaths are characterized as uncaring, shallow, insincere, charming, manipulative, and overconfident (Hirstein). This would develop at an early age, usually in adolescence, or even from birth. Some scientists are willing to argue that psychopathy is genetic and that certain people are just the unlucky bunch. There’s always the debate about nature vs. nurture, and psychopaths are made up almost entirely of nature (Jones).

Research has been done on the brain of many known psychopaths to see what actually happens in their brain. A study was done at King’s College London by Dr. Michael Craig and his colleagues. A scan was done on the brain of nine psychopaths and was compared to those scans of volunteers of a similar age and IQ. Results of the scans suggest that there is a link between the amygdala portion of the brain and the orbitofrontal cortex. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is associated with emotions and the orbitofrontal cortex controls important decision making. There appeared to be a lot of dysfunction within these two parts of the brain to provide support that psychopaths are genetically born with the disease in their brain (Alleyne).

However, babies and children don’t typically start killing right away. There are certain triggers in their childhood to awaken the psychopathy. An abusive environment when young can cause the psychopath to want to retaliate or displace his/her anger somewhere else. Alienation as a child can lead them the realize that they are different from society causing them to rebel from the social norms. Lastly, neglect from parents or those that they look up to makes the psychopath basically lose all emotions. In some cases, the killer will murder because he/she