Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence

By Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley and Vincent Felitti

An “ominous and persuasive” study of when violence starts in child development—and the preventive measures to stop it (The New York Times Book Review).
 
This new, revised edition incorporates significant advances in neurobiological research and includes a new introduction by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, a leading researcher in the field. When Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was first published, it was lauded for providing scientific evidence that violence can originate in the womb and become entrenched in a child’s brain by preschool. The authors’ groundbreaking conclusions became even more relevant following the wave of school shootings across the nation including the tragedies at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and shocking subsequent shootings.
 
Following each of these, media coverage and public debate turned yet again to the usual suspects concerning the causes of violence: widespread availability of guns and lack of mental health services for late-stage treatment. Discussion of the impact of trauma on human life—especially early in life during chemical and structural formation of the brain—is missing from the equation. Karr-Morse and Wiley continue to shift the conversation among parents and policy makers toward more fundamental preventative measures against violence.
 
“Karr-Morse and Wiley boldly raise some tough issues . . . [They] start with a grim question—why are children violent?—and they forge a passionate and cogent argument for focusing our collective energies on infancy and parenthood to stop the cycle of ruined lives.” —The Seattle Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802196330

Book preview

Ghosts from

the Nursery

Ghosts from

the Nursery

TRACING

THE ROOTS OF

VIOLENCE

REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION

Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley

L-1.tif

The Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karr-Morse, Robin

Ghosts from the nursery : tracing the roots of violence / Robin Karr-Morse and

Meredith S. Wiley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-87113-734-0

1. Violence in children—United States.  2. Problem children—United States.  3. Socially handicapped children—United States.  4. Infants—United States—Development.  5. Child psychopathology—United States.  6. Juvenile delinquency—United States.  7. Violent crimes—United States.  I. Wiley, Meredith S.  II. Title.

HQ784.V55K37 1997

618.92’89—dc21 97-15096

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9633-0

Photograph opposite title page copyright © by Robin Karr-Morse

Page 397 is an extension of the copyright page.

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To the people who continue to teach us the most:

Erin, Cameron, Jason, Jordan, Gretchen, Bill,

and

Caroline and to a sweet little boy named Kent

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Revised Edition

Introduction to the First Edition

1. Ghosts from the Nursery

2. Grand Central: EARLY BRAIN ANATOMY AND VIOLENCE

3. Before We Know It: PRENATAL EXPOSURE TO DRUGS AND MALNUTRITION

4. Love’s Labor Lost: ADVERSE EXPERIENCES IN THE WOMB AND AT BIRTH

5. Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick: THE DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR DISORDERS

6. Tea for Two: THE ROLE OF TEMPERAMENT

7. Baby, Get Your Gun: THE IMPACT OF TRAUMA AND HEAD INJURY

8. The Hand That Rocks: THE IMPACT OF EARLY EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION

9. Where’s Poppa?

10. All the King’s Horses

11. And Still We Wait

Epilogue

Appendix A: FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH VIOLENT BEHAVIOR THATCAN BE MODIFIED OR PREVENTED BY EARLY INTERVENTION

Appendix B: MYTHS ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN

Appendix C: BEHAVIORAL EFFECTS FOLLOWING PRENATAL DRUG EXPOSURE

Appendix D: JEFFREY TODAY

Appendix E: PRIMARY PREVENTION: A CONTINUUM OF PROGRAMS THAT WORK

Appendix F: RESOURCES

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Ghosts from the nursery is an alteration of a phrase coined by psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg: ghosts in the nursery. Fraiberg used this phrase to refer to the tendency of parents to bring to the rearing of their children the unresolved issues of their own childhoods. Ghosts from the nursery is used to express the idea that murderers and other violent criminals, who were once infants in our communities, are always accompanied by the spirits of the babies they once were together with the forces that killed their promise. The metaphor has connected for thousands of readers since Ghosts from the Nursery was first published in 1997, as Americans searched among relatively superficial explanations of the roots of violence in our nation and across the world.

When Ghosts from the Nursery was first made available to the public, the spate of school shootings across the United States had barely begun. At the time we thought that the first of these—the killing of two students and one teacher by a fourteen-year-old in Moses Lake, Washington—had been an anomaly. The second school shooting did not occur until almost a year later, in February 1997, when a sixteen-year-old shot his principal and one student at his school in Bethel, Alaska. But just as the manuscript for Ghosts was going to press in 1997 we began to see evidence of a frightening trend: In October, two students were killed and seven were wounded by sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham in Pearl, Mississippi, and in December, three students were killed and five wounded by a fourteen-year-old in Paducah, Kentucky. As the year ended, another shooting took place in Stamps, Arkansas, when a fourteen-year-old hid in the woods to ambush two students in the school parking lot.

In 1998, the pattern escalated again. In March of that year, one teacher and four students were killed and ten others wounded outside their middle school as a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old student shot their classmates while they stood outside their school in response to a false fire alarm. A second middle school shooting took place the following month in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, when a fourteen-year-old shot a teacher and two students at a school dance. Three additional high school shootings followed that spring in Fayetteville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; and Springfield, Oregon. This latter event had a huge impact on those living in Oregon. The fifteen-year-old shooter, Kip Kinkel, was the son of two respected teachers. On the previous day in May, Kip had been suspended and sent home for bringing a gun to school. Kip rose the next morning and shot each of his parents, then went to Thurston High School where he opened fire on his schoolmates in the cafeteria, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others.

In 1999, one middle school shooting occurred in Deming, New Mexico, and three high school shootings occurred in Georgia, Oklahoma, and, the deadliest thus far, Littleton, Colorado. At Columbine High School, one teacher and fourteen students were killed and ­twenty-three students were wounded in a well-planned and meticulously rehearsed massacre by two adolescent boys who, like Kip Kinkel, were from middle-class families. Videos documented that the boys had spent hours in the woods near their homes staging the massacre over the course of several months.

Following Columbine, as the new millennium unfolded, Americans have lived through more than thirty school shootings. Few of these have received extensive coverage in the media. But 2012 culminated in a new level of horror. The pre-Christmas massacre of twenty six- and seven-year-olds and six staff in their grade school classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, stirred us from a decade of ennui regarding violence among our children.

Until Newtown, this millennium’s discussion of violence in America was focused on concerns outside our country—war in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the slaughter of young children on our own turf generated an unprecedented level of anxiety. If we can’t protect our children—the most vulnerable among us—who are we?

We have known for a long time that the confluence of madmen and guns is disastrous. Following each of the major school shootings across the nation, the conversation about firearms and mental instability has filled the media to the point that strangers passing in a grocery store exchange informal remarks on gun control as if they had all just exited a lecture on the topic. Harder to talk about is the madmen side of the equation. But this is where the real conversation needs to take place.

Gun control is a critical issue, and we need to do all we can to employ adequate background checks in order to keep firearms out of the hands of children and emotionally unstable adults. But the common denominator we continue to overlook in these events is the pervasive question of why and the central role of the human brain in the equation. How and why can a baby develop into a vicious killer? And what can we do about it?

The person who answers this most succinctly is Dr. Bruce Perry, director of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, who is frequently cited in the ensuing chapters. Perry claims, It’s not the finger that pulls the trigger, it’s the brain. It’s not the penis that rapes, it’s the brain. Violence begins in the brain, and the brain begins in the womb.

Ghosts from the Nursery explains how all behavior, prosocial or antisocial, is controlled by a physical organ: the brain. And we will elucidate how the brain is fundamentally built inside of relationships—beginning with the mother during gestation. If the caregiving relationship is inadequate or traumatic, especially in the first thousand days of life when the brain is chemically and structurally forming, the part of the brain that allows the baby to feel connected with another person can be lost or greatly impaired. A child may mature lacking the ability to attach or to relate in any profound way to others, rendering the child emotionally damaged. Absent adequate nurturing by an emotionally competent caregiver, the baby faces an unpredictable tide of unregulated emotions.

To enable a baby to build this critical part of human function requires time and a quality of care that we continue to overlook in our discussions of why. We have yet to recognize that if a baby’s experiences are pathological and are steeped in chronic fear, the very capacities that mitigate against violent behavior—including empathy and the capacity for self-regulation of strong emotions—can be lost. As these children grow into adolescence and adulthood, impulsive and aggressive behaviors are common outcomes across class and ethnic lines. Fundamentally, Ghosts from the Nursery argues that children who are attached and empathic with other people, who have learned from their caregivers how to modulate strong negative emotions and are primed to focus on complex problem solving, are not attracted to aggression and violence or to using guns to hurt other people. It’s time to make the connection.

In this revised edition of Ghosts from the Nursery, we have updated all data, though we have not replaced most of the original research articles reported in the first edition unless newer research contradicts the original outcomes of studies. When we found a major relevant addition to the research, we added brief updates in a section we call Postscript at the end of the affected chapters. The acquisition of data on some issues (e.g., crime rate) is done by several agencies (e.g., the FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics) and is sometimes inconsistent, so references are always noted.

Each chapter in this book is introduced with pieces of the story of Jeffrey, a young murderer. Told in his own words, his brother’s words, and excerpts from his child welfare case records, the story—in all important aspects—is true. Only names, places, and certain facts not central to the actual crime were altered to protect his identity.

At the time that Ghosts was originally published, Jeffrey sat on death row pending the outcome of his appeal. Now his sentence has been commuted to life without parole. Due to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that makes it illegal for minors to receive the death penalty or life without parole, it may be possible for Jeffrey to eventually have his sentence further commuted to life with parole and to ultimately earn his freedom. But this possibility depends on how this new ruling will be interpreted state by state and case by case and is open to speculation. In appendix D, at the end of the book, we bring you up to date on Jeffrey’s life over the last fifteen years since we originally interviewed him. Our hope is that Jeffrey will ultimately earn his freedom and will continue to influence the decisions of other youths who are fortunate enough to benefit from Jeffrey’s story inside prison walls, a story he is increasingly determined to share with the world.

Jeffrey’s file was originally selected with the help of lawyers, police, and child welfare and mental health professionals because it typifies the profile of a violent, impulsive, but not premeditated or cold-blooded murderer. Psychiatric reports confirm that Jeffrey is not sociopathic. While there were three adolescents involved in the crime, Jeffrey’s story is the only one told because of limitations of time, space, and the complexity of conveying his detailed recollections pertinent to each chapter. The authors continue to thank all the professionals and the extended family of Jeffrey who contributed to this story, as well as Jeffrey himself. To a great extent, even though facts and individual circumstances in the lives of violent children vary greatly, Jeffrey’s story illustrates key factors in the stories of most children who kill. Mike Green, formerly the district attorney for Monroe County in Rochester, New York—and currently the executive director of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services—says that in all his years as district attorney he never prosecuted a capital case where the defendant didn’t have a serious history of child abuse.

A note of reassurance to parents: Having received feedback on this manuscript from many experienced parents, we find that it is a common response to feel anxious or guilty upon recognizing the potentially powerful impact on babies of treatment over which parents may have had little previous knowledge or control. For example, a mother may have consumed alcohol before she knew she was pregnant or may have suffered a period of postpartum depression.

But we may all be reassured that with the possible exception of certain rare head injuries, no one biological or social factor by itself predisposes a child to violent behavior. The research underscores that it is the interaction of multiple factors that may set the stage for the child’s later violent behavior; for example, fetal alcohol syndrome combined with early neglect due to the mother’s alcoholism combined with physical abuse of the child. No one negative experience predisposes children to violence. The multiple factors that, in interaction with one another, have been correlated with later violent behavior are presented in appendix A.

Everyone makes mistakes with babies. We all have done things as parents that we wish we hadn’t done. But the human lapses in essentially constructive interactions with babies due to ignorance or desperation are not the genesis of violence. If this were the case, all of us would be so disposed. The key to understanding the roots of violence is the number of factors at play in relationship to the number of protective factors available in the child’s environment.

SCARED SICK

For many years after Ghosts from the Nursery was published, a question that consistently surfaced from our audience was "How do you explain the majority of children who survive early abuse or neglect but never become violent? Do some of us emerge unscathed in spite of early trauma?" While we knew the answer to this question was clearly no, at that time we did not yet have the science to make the case. Now we do.

The first answer to this question regarding the majority of child trauma victims came to us in the form of the Adverse Childhood Experience Study, first published by Dr. Vincent Felitti and Dr. Robert Anda in 1999. Known as the ACE Study, the research reveals a clear correlation between the number of traumatic experiences in childhood and adult mental, physical, and behavioral health, including addiction (more about this in chapter 10). Essentially, the more emotionally traumatic experiences one has in childhood, the more profound the consequences to adult health. This study opened the door. The next steps were to understand the biology that explained the correlations and what we can do to prevent and to heal such consequences to our health, which is the topic of Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease (Basic Books, 2012).

As is true with aggressive and violent behavior, the consequences of early chronic emotional trauma may not be evident in mental, physical, or behavioral health until later in development. The specific path these outcomes take is influenced by many factors including genetics; timing; frequency; the kind of trauma experienced; the child’s previous experience, temperament, and intelligence; and, most important, who was there to protect and comfort and heal.

In the introduction to this revised volume of Ghosts from the Nursery, Dr. Felitti—an esteemed physician, researcher, author, and ­speaker—illuminates the potential for this understanding. Although it’s commonly believed that by the time we become adults we forget the trauma we experience as babies and toddlers, in fact the first thousand days of life may set the course of our health for the rest of our lives.

Chronic emotional trauma in childhood is the common denominator in both books. Many of us find our own stories, renewed hope, and healing in understanding the effects of this reality in so many lives.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to the many people who contributed to this book and made it possible. In particular, we would like to thank Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Penelope Leach, Dr. Bruce Perry, and Irving Harris, not only for their significant contributions to our effort, but also for their passionate work and eloquent voices on behalf of infants and toddlers and their families. We would also like to thank Dr. Allan Schore and Dr. Geraldine Dawson, whose incredible work spans the disciplines and transcends the centuries-old nature-nurture dichotomy. And to Dr. Ronald David, our gratitude for your support from the beginning.

Many other researchers also generously contributed their time, shared their work, and, in many cases, read and commented on the manuscript: Kathryn Barnard, Stella Chess, Craig Ramey, Ed Tronick, Charles Nelson, JoAnn Robinson, David Olds, Harry Chugani, Bob Bradley, Mary Rothbart, Jim Satterfield, Breena Satterfield, Sarnoff Mednick, Adrian Raine, Patricia Brennan, Susan Clark, Mary Schneider, Gary Kraemer, Linda Mayes, John Reid, Gerald Patterson, William Greenough, Robert Cairns, David Chamberlain, Ludwig Janus, Charles Golden, and Matthew Melmed. Friends, both professional and personal including Dave Frohnmayer, Ken Magid, Wade Horn, Barbara Fendeisen, Julian Sturton, Susan Conklin, and Eileen Rossick, contributed information and helped put us in touch with a wide network of people.

We would be remiss not to mention our indebtedness to Ron Kotulak for his Pulitzer Prize–winning series of newspaper articles, Unlocking the Mind, which was published by the Chicago Tribune in 1993 and was the first widely disseminated exploration of the new research on early brain development.

We also wish to thank Jeffrey and his family who shared their private lives and painful experiences with us in order to make a difference in the lives of other children. When the task of synthesizing and translating the brain research became at times overwhelming, it was Jeffrey’s courage that spurred us on. Also providing their voices and support to this material were Jeffrey’s lawyer, his former child welfare caseworker, and a former district attorney who had known Jeffrey as a victim of abuse and neglect. Our thanks, too, to Tammy, who really wanted to help.

Without our editor, Joan Bingham, and the staff at Grove/Atlantic the embryonic vision of this book would not have been born; it was this group who nurtured a concept into reality. Assisting this process on the other coastline was our research assistant Gretchen Berkey, who juggled her babies and household to spend hours in the library and on the Internet finding elusive materials—even when the cites were incomplete. Thanks also to Jan Laird whose remarkable computer skills saved the day on more than one occasion, and to Stephen Dow and Janelle Pierce who gave of their hearts as well as their talents to help Robin put the face of the baby on the cover in spite of an impossible timeline.

We give a special thanks to Colin, whose quiet voice and critical thinking contributed more than we can possibly convey. His love and unshakable belief in the value of what we were doing invariably pulled us forward when we became discouraged.

And special appreciation goes to our children and their ­spouses, our grandchildren, and friends who put up with our frequent and lengthy disappearances to Black Butte Ranch and who loved us ­anyway—especially Jordy.

This revised version of Ghosts from the Nursery would not have happened without the support of our insightful editor, Joan Bingham—once again—and Judy Hottensen, who made it all happen with grace and in record time. Thank you both, along with Zachary Pace, who lent his talents to editing throughout.

For this revision we owe special thanks to Dr. Vincent Felitti for his review of the manuscript and his thoughtful introduction. And to Dr. Robert Anda, Dr. Robert Scaer, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Bruce McEwen, and Dr. Daniel Siegel for their pioneering work in illuminating the long-term impact of childhood trauma. Finally, our heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Kanwaljeet Sunny Anand, who, by shining his light on the sensitivity and potential of the infant nervous system, continues to change the world.

Introduction

to the Revised Edition

In my beginning is my end.

—T. S. ELIOT

Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was a superb book in its first edition, one and a half decades ago. The new edition of this significant book incorporates the relevant major advances in the field of human development since then. This book focuses on clearly explaining our rapidly increasing understanding of the importance of connection and attachment between an infant and his or her parents in the very earliest days and months of life, and how that absence of process plays out violently later in childhood and many decades later.

The authors capably state, The popular belief in the United States is that the baby, let alone the fetus, is exempt from thought and the capacity to record enduring experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . As is true of most ghosts, these aspects remain invisible, at least to the naked eye. And in that invisibility lies the power of these forces to continue to haunt us. They then proceed in an eminently understandable manner to explain the processes and mechanisms by which neurodevelopment proceeds to leave as socially visible records those children who are the hallmarks of capable parenting or who are the hallmarks of infants who were born but not raised.

The core organization of Ghosts from the Nursery involves a careful description of selected violent lives, coupled with a detailed analysis of their origins. A moment’s reflection on the usual news media’s approach to the latest horror story of a school shooting, gang violence, or a teen suicide makes us realize that meaningful information is almost always absent about the parents and the earliest lives of those individuals, as though the gentleman’s agreement of our time is to be totally avoidant of this disturbing realm. Instead, poverty, race, and genetics are routinely used as convenient scapegoats, raising the question, Do we really want to know?

Again quoting Ghosts, Violence begins in the brain, and the brain begins in the womb. This important observation is seriously uncomfortable for all parents to acknowledge, since the vast majority of us are never taught what is involved in supportive parenting, and a great many have never experienced it. How then would we learn about such matters? And yet we have hints of awareness at some primitive level by our use of expressions like The baby is the father of the man, or As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Moving us smoothly beyond commonplace realizations, the authors take us through the current scientific understanding of the origins and mechanisms of human development and the origins of violence to a basic contact with psychoneuroimmunology. Repeatedly, they help us see that the necessary intermediary mechanisms whereby life experiences become neurologically inscribed in our brains are not to be confused with basic causes. The universally important topics in this book about human development and the very early origins of violence are successfully presented in a remarkably clear, interesting, and understandable manner. Don’t look away.

—Vincent J. Felitti, MD

Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program

Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California

Introduction

to the First Edition

This book is a call to alarm. It presents data to document what we have long observed: that experiences in infancy which result in the child’s inability to regulate strong emotions are too often the overlooked source of violence in children and adults. Story after story points to the importance of intrauterine conditions and early experiences which can lead to future violent behavior. The elegant writing in this book belies its frightening message.

I first met Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley in 1991 when they asked me to present my research in infancy to the Oregon legislature’s Children’s Care Team. We became soul mates immediately. Robin and Meredith were shepherding the team which was created to revamp the state’s system of services for families with children in response to growing numbers of children who were suffering serious maltreatment.

Having worked in the trenches with children and their families in both private practice and public service, Robin was the consultant to the Care Team. Meredith, with a legal and political background, was the firebrand chief of staff for the speaker of the house. Robin’s frontline observations of the impact of early maltreatment on children’s lives were central in shaping a focus on early and accessible one-stop services for families which begin prenatally. But the battle for preventive social services was not, and still is not, easily won.

As Robin and Meredith worked in Oregon to convince legislators of the importance of beginning early, they found that there was too little evidence in the research literature to back up the commonsense understanding that early experience shapes a child’s future toward good or evil. They were struggling against huge odds as they attempted to enlist public funds to begin earlier to address child abuse and neglect, welfare, and hunger. There was too little published to convince the American public, let alone legislators and governors, of this necessity. Hence this book.

The authors have done a monumental job of capturing our present knowledge of early development and the influences of the earliest environment on a child’s developmental processes. This volume is already a timely classic to add to the present surge of interest in early experience as it relates to the epidemic of violence in our nation. The recent meeting at the White House represented the Clintons’ and Gores’ sounding of the alarm. Early brain development and its relation to later deviations in impulse control and to the repetition of developmental deprivation and violence was outlined. The nation was alerted to the neglect of our most vulnerable sector: small children. We are the richest, most powerful nation, and yet we are the least child- and family-oriented culture in the civilized world. This volume lays the foundation for a groundswell of public awareness. Hopefully, this alert will lead to solutions. Will they cost a lot? Compared to what!

This book is a call to all of us. It is beautifully written and well documented. If all who care about children and families can use it, maybe we can turn around the tide of our nation’s surge toward violence and self-destruction. Otherwise, our children and grandchildren will face a devastating future. We cannot afford any longer to bury our heads in the sand. We do know what to do. This excellent piece of work documents that. Can we create the national will to do it?

—Dr. T. Berry Brazelton

Ghosts from

the Nursery

1

Ghosts from the Nursery

Do Lawd, come down here and walk amongst yo people

And tek ’em by the hand and telt ’em

That yo ain’t hex wid ’em

And do Lawd come yoself,

Don’t send yo son,

Cause dis ain’t no place for chillen.

—PRAYER FOLLOWING EARTHQUAKE OF 1866,

CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, COMPOSED BY SLAVES

In the middle of the night, on May 11, 1993, in the rural Northwest, an eighty-four-year-old man was bludgeoned to death. Three teenagers, high on drugs, had been on a joyride, which by morning included stealing a car, robbing a convenience store, and murder. The youths first knocked on the old man’s door and then broke inside to use the bathroom. Jeffrey later confessed to striking the victim on the head with a flashlight that the man had given them to find their way in the dark. The man was then kicked by the youths as he lay on the floor. He was found unconscious the next afternoon by a neighbor, lying near the front door of the farmhouse where he had lived all of his life and where he had seen the raising of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He died several months after the attack without ever regaining consciousness.

The youths were identified by several witnesses as Jeffrey, age sixteen; Roger, age seventeen; and Roger’s girlfriend, Crystal, age fourteen. Both Jeffrey and Roger had juvenile records. Crystal did not. Crystal was granted immunity and was not prosecuted. Roger was convicted of robbery with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to twenty years, nine of which he served. After the victim died, Roger was charged with accessory to first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years. He was released in January 2012, having served eleven years. Jeffrey pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After the victim’s death, Jeffrey was charged with murder, tried by a jury, found guilty, and sentenced to death. His case was subsequently commuted to life without parole; he was removed from death row and has continued to live within prison walls for the last twenty years.

He looks like the kid next door. Unassuming, he greets you through the prison visitors’ window with a shy but ready smile. He is nervous, speaks thoughtfully, and clearly appreciates your attention. His body and his mind move quickly. Anxious for approval, he pours out complete explanations of what he anticipates you came to ask, far more than you would comfortably request. You are a stranger to this boy, but you recognize your own kids’ mannerisms, language, interests. He is just days past his eighteenth birthday. He likes to sing and write poetry, which he shares somewhat hesitantly, glancing up often to gauge your reaction. His light brown hair is clean and well kept. His eyes are hazel and clear. Insights unusual for one so young permeate his stories. He chooses to stand apart from his present peer group, hanging out mostly with his cellmate, with whom he shares an interest in self-education and social reform, particularly of the criminal justice system.

A few years ago Jeffrey seemed like just another kid living in the backwash of an unremarkable rural community. A casual observer might have easily overlooked the predictably explosive mixture of life circumstances that heralded disaster for Jeffrey—to say nothing of his victim. Jeffrey’s story is one told hundreds of times daily in courtrooms across our nation. It is a story told by events, psychiatric reports, interviews with victims, witnesses, friends, and family. The quest for explanations in the aftermath of violence often delves into adolescence, into grade school and childhood. But the beginning of stories like Jeffrey’s goes untold. One chapter is nearly always missing—the first chapter, encompassing gestation, birth, and infancy. And because it goes unseen and unacknowledged, it repeats itself over and over at a rate now growing in geometric proportions.

We overlook this period in our search for the causes of violence because we believe that it is irrelevant, not only to this particular crime, but to later experience generally. The popular belief in the United States is that the baby, let alone the fetus, is exempt from thought and the capacity to record enduring experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. This overlooked chapter of early growth sees the building of the capacities for focused thinking and for empathy—or the lack of these. From the time of late gestation and birth, we begin to develop a template of expectations about ourselves and other people, anticipating responsiveness or indifference, success or failure. This is when the foundation of who we become and how we relate to others and to the world around us is built.

So Jeffrey’s story and others like his become ghost stories. Accompanying this convicted murderer is the ghost of the baby he once was and the echoes of the forces that transformed that baby. As is true of most ghosts, these aspects remain invisible, at least to the naked eye. And in that invisibility lies the power of these forces to continue to haunt us.

Though he was just sixteen at the time of his crime, many would argue that Jeffrey was an accountable adult. When faces like his appear in the news, we see the adult or adolescent criminal and place responsibility with the individual, holding him culpable for his actions. We can readily dismiss the Jeffreys as criminals who deserve to pay their debt to society. There are procedures and facilities in place to contain and punish adults. That these people are costly to taxpayers, that their contributions are lost to society, and that their numbers are growing at an alarming rate are all issues that concern us.

But the truly terrifying and more complicated addition to this conversation is the wave of new young criminal faces in the news, such as the eighty-pound twelve-year-old whose chin barely rises above the table in a hearing room of the Wenatchee, Washington, courthouse. His thin wrists are cuffed and his ankles are bound with chains. As he sits listening to the prosecutor tell the story of his premeditated murder of a migrant farmworker, his legs barely touch the floor. Using handguns stolen earlier in the afternoon, this boy and several friends had strolled along the Columbia River firing at bottles and logs. When fifty-year-old Emilio Pruneda called from a nearby thicket to chill out, the boys circled the thicket and fired. Pruneda threw a rock, hitting one boy in the face. The boys fired more shots and then ran to a bank and reloaded the guns. When they found Pruneda lying where he had been hit earlier, one boy emptied the rounds from a .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol and a .22 caliber revolver into Pruneda. There were eighteen bullet holes in his body.

In May 1995, headline news introduced the country to Robert Sandifer, nicknamed Yummy. Yummy was an eleven-year-old gang member who, having shot a fourteen-year-old girl, brought so much negative attention to his gang that he was executed by them. Yummy was found dead in a highway underpass, shot in the back of the head. His executioners were fourteen and sixteen years old. Yummy captured the nation’s attention when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in June 1995. Later that month in an interview with Patrick Murphy, the Cook County public defender, Oprah Winfrey asked whether Yummy and others like him had slipped through the cracks. Murphy responded emphatically:

There was no crack here. We knew—we should have known exactly what was going on . . . What you saw in Sandifer wasn’t a kid who fell between the cracks. You saw a kid that was born to a mom who had her first child when she was fifteen, who was welfare-dependent, who came from a family who is welfare dependent. . . . The grandmother was in her younger thirties when Mom had the kid at fifteen. Robert’s father . . . was in and out of the picture at best. When he [Robert] came into the system at two years and ten months, he had cigarette burns on his arm, his neck, his butt. . . . The sister was brought into the system when she was ten months old, about three months before Robert. . . . She had second-degree burns in her vagina, and the mother said that she dropped her on the radiator.¹

Very young and generally undetected victims of trauma or chronic maltreatment who become very young perpetrators of violence are no longer rare news stories. And the growing percentage of the crimes being committed by these children are shocking in their cruelty and aggression: a ten-year-old who killed a nine-month-old baby by kicking and hitting her with shoes and a basketball until she stopped crying; a four-year-old who climbed into a crib in his grandmother’s day care center and stomped an eight-week-old baby to death; a ten-year-old who killed an eighty-four-year-old neighbor by beating her with her cane and then slashing her throat with a knife from her kitchen; four second-grade boys who pinned a seven-year-old girl to the ground during recess and tried to kill her for breaking up with their eight-year-old gang leader.

As in Jeffrey’s case, we don’t see the ghosts from the nursery in these stories. Because of the tender age of these criminals, however, as we look for explanations, we may look more in depth at the childhoods they have not yet left behind. It is this group of offenders, children twelve and under with a history of chronic aggression, who are forcing us to look earlier. For the majority of these early offenders, the records are clear: By age four they show consistent patterns of aggression, bullying, tantrums, and coercive interactions with others.²

The headline of a New York Times article on November 19, 1995, which reported a decline in the rate of adult crime, also warned of coming storms of juvenile crime. Professor John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania said that we are experiencing a lull before the crime storm. He cited the 40 million kids 10 years old and younger who are about to become teenagers, the largest group of adolescents in a generation. He believes that there are more children now than ever before who are growing up without guidance, responsibility, or internalized social values.

Fortunately, the predicted crime storm failed to materialize. For juveniles, the arrest rate for violent offenses grew from approximately 300 to 500 per 100,000 between 1980 and 1994, dropped to 270 in 2004, and fell to fewer than 250 per 100,000 by 2010. Arrest rates generally fell for every age group and for all violent offenses between 1994 and 2004, especially among older juveniles (ages fifteen to seventeen) and young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-four). The declines in the rate of murder arrests involving juveniles and young adults completely reversed the increases seen prior to 1994, bringing murder arrest rates down to levels below those of 1980.³

The murder rate for all age groups in the United States has dropped over 50 percent since 1991, going from 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 4.7 per 100,000 in 2011.⁴ Violent crime (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) has dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s. This precipitous drop is attributed to a combination of four main factors:

• increased incarceration and length of sentencing;

• improved law enforcement strategies and tactics that draw on new technologies and advances in computer analysis;

• the winding down of the crack epidemic, which plagued the United States from 1984 to 1990;

• the aging of the U.S. population.⁵

However, it is unclear how long this downward trend will continue. The FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report shows a slight uptick of 1.9 percent in violent crime in the first six months of 2012. Property crimes also rose 1.5 percent overall. While two of the four offenses in the violent crime category actually showed overall

Reviews for Ghosts from the Nursery

[tkmarnell · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book discusses some interesting material--the effects of the environment on personality and emotional development. However, the authors' approach is decidedly biased. They went into it in the mindset of persuasion with a dash of sensationalism, and consequently there is little discussion of any research that contradicts the assumptions they push. They would have you believe, for example, that a few moments being hungry in the cold as a newborn will naturally produce a serial killer with ADHD. It's interesting fodder for debate among psychology majors, but not a book I would recommend for reliable information on early childhood development.