Should We Humanize Inhuman Acts?

As a psychologist, especially one who has spent a large portion of my career in forensics, it’s not a huge surprise to me that I enjoy memoirs, documentaries, and docuseries. Real-life stories give us access to the incredible diversity of human experience.

When Netflix and Crime+Investigation UK released the docuseries I Am A Killer, I was intrigued, but the premise of I Am A Killer is (deceptively) simple and I admit I was initially skeptical. The summary on Netflix states “Death row inmates convicted of capital murder give firsthand accounts of their crimes in this documentary series.” Because American culture, and TV media in general, tends to sensationalize stories and depict them in largely binary terms–good versus evil–I wondered if this might be just another dehumanizing depiction of a bad guy. Or equally as bad, an overly sentimental, no-accountability view of people who commit crimes. As someone who spent much of my career evaluating and working with people who have committed crimes, I can attest that life is complex and people are as well. Unfortunately, this nuanced picture is rarely depicted.

Source: Image by Samantha Stein

I decided to give it a go, and I’m not at all sorry I did. The convicted murderers, most of them on death row in states with the death penalty, share their versions of the killings in question, as well as their thoughts and feelings about it today. But we also hear from prosecutors, attorneys, law enforcement officials, friends, and family who all share their versions, thoughts, and the impact of the crime.

What results is surprisingly nuanced. As an audience, we expect a story that’s simple–one that will evoke predictable and clear-cut feelings about everyone involved. A person killed someone else and was convicted for it. End of story. We expect to feel anger, outrage, and repulsion about the killer, and sadness, compassion, and horror about the victim.

Thankfully, the show often doesn’t give us what we expect. We do always feel sadness for the victims and grief for the loved ones left behind. But how we (and the victims’ families) feel about the perpetrators is not always so cut-and-dry. There are often many, layered factors that lead people up to the point at which they commit terrible crimes, and the show helps us to sit with the discomfort of seeing the humanity in many of the criminals. As we hear their stories and their feelings and learn about their own history of trauma, substance abuse, and other influences that led up to their behaviors, our feelings about them become more complex. Oftentimes, they are accountable for what they have done, and even deeply remorseful, which adds to the complexity of our feelings about them as well. The show humanizes them, and that’s not always comfortable for a viewer who would prefer to see them as something other than human.

One in every three US adults has a criminal record, and there are currently 2.3 million people in prison in the US. Those statistics make it almost impossible to live in the US and not know someone–or be related to someone–who has been convicted of a crime. And yet, our news, TV shows, and other media continue to portray people who commit crimes as one-dimensional, bad people who seem to be born that way and should simply be locked up for what they’ve done. This attitude and portrayal are not only harmful to those who have been convicted (and their friends and family), but ultimately it’s harmful to all of us. Because if we actually want to prevent crimes from happening, we need to understand and fix the problems that create the humans that commit those crimes.

We all want to think of ourselves as “good people.” Sometimes we do that by seeing people who do bad things as “not like us,” as something other than human. We don’t want to imagine that we might be capable of committing terrible acts (or even forgiving these terrible acts) so we hold those people as something other than us. This reflexive “othering” is understandable, but ultimately it simply serves to make us afraid and badly informs our laws and behaviors towards people who do commit those acts. Even worse, it doesn’t stop crime. It doesn’t prevent it because it doesn’t help us to see what actually leads human beings to commit these crimes. The truth is that close to 70 percent of incarcerated people were abused as children, which is five times as common as the general population of the US. Learning disabilities are five times more common in the state prison population than in the general population. I would never suggest that either of these things causes people to commit crimes. However, if we actually want to prevent crimes from occurring, preventing child abuse and improving our education system would be two of the logical places to start.

I would never suggest not holding people accountable for what they’ve done, and neither does the show I Am A Killer. But I appreciate that the show allows the viewer to see a crime committed within context. To see the human story of the criminals and the victims and the effect that trauma and substance abuse can have on all of us. This series contains one episode per offender, and it can only scratch the surface. But it is a surface worth scratching for all of us if we want to create a society and world that produces fewer victims.