Criminality

Introduction

Structure of Essay - A Working Definition of Criminality - A Continuum -  Official Local Criminality - Coroner Department Criminality - Official Federal Government Criminality - Criminality Narrative - Rationales - Gangs - Nuclear Terrorism - Reagan

Socially Sanctioned Criminality

Misplacement of Revenge and Hate

Here I write about normal and abnormal criminality. Huge differences exist between these two, and a thin line may also exist between them at times.

Normal criminality might pass as an individual's ready admission to their criminal behavior. Hypocrisy need not blemish their contempt for loyalty to law, order, and social norms. In fact, their belief in social norms may include something like this: "Everyone takes what they believe they can get away with. I can get away with what I want." Criminology tells us tens of thousand of crimes go unreported every year in our United States. Those committing these crime know their probability of capture remains reasonably low once they work out details of their criminal conduct.

A Working Definition of Criminality

Criminality exists as a mental condition, a psychological predisposition. It develops from self for belittling others for self-esteem enhancement, self-aggrandizement, and unconscious, self-destructive impulses. We find hate, fear, and loathing of others at its roots. Through a child's development to adult, a child-like resentment remains while social, cultural, and economic forces lead to mixed feelings. Just as a child projects their rage, so to do adults, but in a more subtle, socially constrained manner.

Criminality - A Continuum

Criminality exists on a continuum, not unlike other continuums found in human behavior and existence. If we wanted to represent this continuum from 1 to 10, we would have something to measure where we place various criminalities. We might call these "criminalities" character types for the sake of objectivity, so I choose to use both.

I say nothing new when I point out that without social conscience - - morality, ethics, and more, we easily fall into a sociopath ic characterization of our species.

Without social controls created over thousands of years, criminality would have never allowed human development to reach its current level of interaction. Rape, murder, and mayhem would have continued as those physically in control acted out their power over others. Without social conscience no internalized governor to human driven greed, avarice, fear, and hate would exist. Without social conscience, social control fails and individuals' control by brute force. Until totem poles and significant symbols arose, we can imagine human societies failed to progress. Brute strength determined gains and losses in our human struggle for existence. Repressive restrictions upon ego gratification remained to form.

Deceit by those with less power enabled the weak to survive. Moving forward to today, we find deceit and criminality well entwined in our government bureaucracies just as we find it well mixed between providers and consumers of goods and services.

In those moments when criminality reaches its worst, homicides occur and victim's families respond to their local government's directions.

Official Local Criminality

As I have written elsewhere and so many times, we should look at the very tail-end of our criminal justice system, probate courts, county administrators, coroners, police officers (homicide detectives), and others for criminality.

Here where we least expect it, we victims of criminality confronted by a second criminality under color of authority.

Probate courts settle confusing legal issues associated with decedent's unclaimed estates to help administrate property and human remains. Here we do not expect to find criminality, at least not often. When we do find criminality, it comes in the distribution of enriching legal assignments to private attorneys, real estate agents, and others. A probate court has a duty to assign an attorney to help unravel a decedent's property issues, such as mortgages, relative's claims on decedent's property, and so forth. Here a court may unknowingly enrich a county clerk, or even an assigned county administration employee.

County administration employees enrich themselves from probate court relationships by assigning attorneys and crime scene cleanup companies. In return they receive kickbacks from some crime scene cleanup companies. "After all," they reason, "someone's got to do it, and I deserve something for all the work I do." Unconsciously they clear their conscience with a hierarchy of ideal values attributable to them, only. We can see how death cleanup work assigned for employees' personal gain easily grows from positions of power and opportunity. Hubris along with a neurotic social conscience drives these employees' criminality, in my opinion.

Coroner Department Criminality

Coroner's department employees profit from homicides, suicides, and unattended deaths. They do so because our criminal justice system requires some sort of investigation into unusual deaths. As a result, coroner's employees have an opportunity to enrich themselves. A visit to Orange County Consumer Fraud will clarify this matter. I use Orange County, California because I have observed criminality in the Orange County Government's Coroner Department and Administration Department for a number of years. I use Orange County as my model for criminality in local government's legitimized death administration. This tail-end of our criminal justice system probably receives the least scrutiny for critical appraisal.

Another note here on Sheriff Department criminality in Orange County, California. Bail bonds become a second source of income for Orange County Sheriff jailers. They are known to refer new inmates to various Orange County bail bond companies at the expense of others. This has gone on since 1998. A familiar year to those with some historic knowledge about this county "behind the Orange curtain."

Consider the Los Angeles Police Department's history with criminal police conduct, from the Pico Union District's drug dealing police officers, to many questionable shootings over the decades, including that of Rubin Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter.

Official Federal Government Criminality

We can move up our government hierarchy to criminality at both our state and federal levels. Here we find authoritative "knowledge" from those in power to order what's best for us.

I place criminality up front with simply recognized criminal conduct related to homicide on a monumental scale. If we look to federal government lies related to our incursion into Viet Nan in the 1960s, we find the "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution to murder based itself on a monumental lie. Senator John McCain would later report on his findings related to Gulf of Tonkin incident, itself.

Then we have lies related to our invasion of Grenada and its irrelevancy to United States foreign policy, other than manipulating unpleasant media accounts of terrorist sponsored attacks on Nicaraguan civilians.

Last, to wrap up this point, we have "The weapons of mass destruction" leading to our involvement in Iraq, prompting an emergence of an Iranian threat to others, and more. So there's plenty of official criminality to go around before I begin "criminality" narrative below.

Criminality Narrative

I could write the rest of my life on criminality and not scratch its surface. A form of "social deviancy," criminality goes back to the beginning of time, Homicide in our first monotheist family, Adam and Eve's first born, fell victim to his brother's envy, jealousy, rage, and whatever else. An object of homicide, our first monotheistic family was a "dysfunctional family." "We're all sinners in the eyes of the lord," we learn.

I use this biblical account of criminal behavior to couch what follows, the self-destructive motives in the psychology of social transgressors; for their fear of retribution does not mature as in others.

We have used every slogan and punishment imaginable, it seems, to end criminality. "Crime never pays" may slow some children from petty theft, but it does little to stop those criminal acts that I outlined above. So many of our "official" do-gooders actually behave with full knowledge that crime does pay. Basically, we've moved to government agencies for administering society's needs. In doing so we placed criminality where it may grow unburdened by social controls and surveillance.

Socially Sanctioned Criminality

We know too that horrific acts performed within socially sanctioned controls (Hiroshima) passes as "justified homicide" in one generation, then criminal in another. We suspect our justified homicides become "barbaric in a future generation's history of our acts. As a psychological condition, criminality goes on under government sanction.

Readers and TV viewers have known for many years that success follows those working within our law and those working outside our laws. We have police departments involved in using criminal conduct in their criminal investigations and apprehensions. For those of us with an ecological awareness, we know full well that since our economic stability rests upon destroying the ecological prospects of future generations, a form of criminal mentality if ever it existed, monumentally so.

Our ideology of rugged individuality imparts an acceptance of criminality, in part. It's a matter of which criminal activities occur within a social and cultural context. We watched lynching in our southern states and citizens involved in those acts of terrorism were seen as protectors of the "white race."

Then there's an admiration from those who profit from other's misfortunes. For these savvy wheelers-and-dealers, we reserve an admiration for their ability to commit offenses against others and not get caught. Those of us that experienced a shadowy used car salesmen on our first car purchase know what I am talking about. We must not forget our Wall Street financiers and geniuses of derivative transactions too complicated for honest folks to understand. Those who paid a questionable amount to a plumber, electrician, or crime scene cleanup company know exactly what I am talking about. Criminality works fine so long as it works in stealth and profits those in the know. For the stupid criminals who get caught, it becomes an entirely different matter.

See "How Crime Scene Cleanup Works" for a growing piece of writing on criminality in local government. The facts are that criminality pays. Thousands of crimes go unpunished because they go unnoticed, they go undefined, they become part the social fabric of small groups. Put another way, crime pays. Nay sayers point to the liberal ideal that "it's not a crime unless it's in our penal code." Be that as it may, criminality goes on in spite of every social injunction. Intentional harm against others will do as "criminality". For more on this theme, see my article, "War and its Justification in The Middle Ages."

Rationales

Not everyone suffers a crisis of conscience from their criminality. In fact, criminality becomes an easily adopted mode of thinking once it finds aid and comfort in a loyalty to higher ideals or higher social standards. This comes to taking what they want when they want, not unlike our medieval ruling classes. Taking a peasant's newlywed for his own bed the first night of a peasant couple's marriage, a duke, baron, or whomever tested his official capacity. In this case, no crisis of conscience need upset a ruling class male. He had a "duty" to maintain clear power and place in his society's hierarchical chain of being. There's no punishment here. Worse, should a child result from this rape, its social father has a duty to raise it as his own, cuckolded by the ruling class as insult to injury. In this way a semi-progenitor line of descent remains in place in perpetuity.

From this sanctioned, criminal rape we find lofty ideals from the meanest and shallowest of criminal conduct by upright citizens. It remains their "intelligence" and place to abuse the naive and others as "suckers." That their behavior remains somehow aloof from "criminal conduct" as found in our penal code. We should label them "neurotic" in their thinking.

Misplacement of Revenge and Hate

For employees' criminality, I find an unconscious misplacement of their hate and fear of others. By misplacing the object of their fear and hate, manipulating and deceiving peers, superiors, and the public follows easily enough. Their criminality becomes fully integrated into their unconscious self and become externalized as a righteous disregard for other's rights and humanity. We might find these same employees sitting shoulder to shoulder with their devout church members, and they have not one sense of hypocrisy. They have banished their social conscience in the name of a greater good, their greed and avarice. In short, for whatever reason they may have conjured from their own unconscious misplacement of their ideals, their social conscience diminishes the value of their victims. This same process occurs in the least of the criminally minded to the greatest of criminally minded people. It's a continuum, not an either-or condition.

What separates the criminality of social conscience in one person from another becomes a matter of which individuals adhere to social conditioning and our ideals most stringently. Fear and awe become necessary emotional conditions for some of us to remain faithful to our engrained social conscience, however dutifully our parents may have worked to teach us the "Golden Rule."

Some of us become jailers and we truly believe that we must treat others as we would have them treat us. We believe too that we must treat everyone else as if everyone on Earth were to behave in the same manner as ourselves. We also come to see those we have power over in terms of "not doing unto others what we would not have them do unto us." Had Prince Kropotkin somehow uttered this last phrase in an Orange County, California jail, he may have found spiritual kin. In the coroner's office, he would have exposed himself to a spiritually deprived gang of public employees.

Gangs

As local government criminality goes, so goes criminality among youth gangs. Each has a field of experience and a domain of knowledge. Each functions within a hierarchy of values. Each produces outcomes within a context of legality and illegality. Finally, each produces its own truths.

We find a willingness in gangsters to both transgress social norms while upholding their peer group's internalized, external criminality. For example, in our Orange County Coroner's Department, a willingness to bilk family survivors of homicide becomes an agreed upon norm existing without critical examination. We find the same in gangs and their homicidal-suicidal behavior existing without critical examination. In neither case would individual examination withstand agreed upon social norms in public places. In both cases, criminality becomes sublimated for the better good of individual and group enrichment, power.

In both we find individuals accustomed to justifying their deviant behavior on loosely guided self-evaluation: I deserve this.

We must analyze their power relations to understand how these people behave in different institutional contexts. Their behavior modify's, shapes, and directs one another in a chorus of self-enhancing relationships. Left to their own devices in another social setting, their oppositional-defiance, their predatory stance would fail. They know. We know. They know we know. We cannot afford the status-quo if institutions and law enforcement have a future.