Crime And Responsibility

By Charles Krauthammer

"I'm depraved on account I'm deprived."

-- West Side Story

Twelve years ago, Bonnie Garland, a pretty, upper-class Yale student, was murdered. Her estranged boyfriend went up to her bedroom one night and with a hammer cracked her head open "like a watermelon," as he put it. Murders are a dime a dozen in America. But the real story here, the real horror, chronicled in painful detail by Willard Gaylin (in The Killing of Bonnie Garland), was the aftermath: sympathy turned immediately from victim to murderer, a Mexican American recruited to Yale from the Los Angeles barrio. Within five weeks he was free on bail, living with the Christian Brothers and attending a local college under an assumed name. Friends raised $30,000 for his defense. "From my investigation," wrote Gaylin, "it is clear that more tears have since been shed for the killer than for the victim."

Now in New York City another awful crime. A 28-year-old jogger was attacked in Central Park by a gang of teens from nearby Harlem. Police say the boys hunted her down, beat and raped her savagely and left her for dead. At week's end she remained in a coma.

In New York the instinct to "Garland" the monstrous -- to extenuate brutality and make a victim of the victimizer -- is more attenuated than in the Ivy League. The New York tabloids, the moral voice of the community, are full-throated in their vilification of the monstrous "wolf pack." It is their social betters, those from the helping professions, who have lost their moral compass. It is they who would Garland this attack if they could.

These children are "damaged," explains forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston. "They are in pain inside . . . acting out their pain on innocent victims. In the case of the Central Park beating, they picked a victim that was mostly likely to shock and outrage. That speaks to how deep their anger and despair is."

"We have to be honest," explains psychologist Richard Majors. "Society has not been nice to these kids."

"They're letting out anger," explains Alvin Poussaint, the Harvard educator and psychiatrist. "There's a lot of free-floating anger and rage among a lot of our youth."

Rage? Upon arrest, police said, the boys joked and rapped and sang. Asked why he beat her head with a lead pipe, Yusef Salaam was quoted by investigators as saying "It was fun." The boys have not yet been taught to say they did it because of rage, pain and despair, because of the sins whites have visited upon them and their ancestors. But they will be taught. By trial time, they will be well versed in the language of liberal guilt and exoneration.

How could boys have done something so savage? We have two schools. The "rage" school, which would like to treat and heal these boys. And the "monster" school, which would like to string them up.

I'm for stringing first and treating later. After all, the monster theory, unlike the rage theory, has the benefit of evidence. What distinguishes these boys is not their anger -- Who is without it? -- but their lack of any moral faculty. Acts of rage are usually followed by reflection and shame. In this case, these characteristics appear to be entirely missing.

The boys were not angry. They were "wilding." Wilding is not rage, it is anarchy. Anarchy is an excess of freedom. Anarchy is the absence of rules, of ethical limits, of any moral sense. These boys are psychic amputees. They have lost, perhaps never developed, that psychic appendage we call conscience.

Conscience may be inbred, but to grow it needs cultivation. The societal messages that make it through the din of inner-city rap 'n' roll conspire to stunt that growth. They all but drown out those voices trying to nurture a sense of responsibility, the foundation of moral character.

For example, the ever fatuous Cardinal O'Connor could not resist blaming the park assault on, well, society. We must all "assume our responsibility," he & intoned, "for being indifferent to the circumstances that breed crimes of this sort." What circumstances? "Communities which know nothing but frustration."

When the Rev. Calvin Butts III of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church was asked by CBS about the attack, he spoke of "the examples that our children are faced with." Such as? "We've had Presidents resign, foreign Prime Ministers resign in disgrace. We've had Oliver North lie publicly on television . . . And many of our youngsters, across racial lines, see that and then act it out."

Richard Nixon, Noboru Takeshita and Ollie North may have much to answer for in the next world, but the savaging of a young woman in Central Park is not on the list. The effect of such preposterous links is to dilute the notion of individual responsibility. Entire communities are taught to find blame everywhere but in themselves. The message takes. New York Newsday interviewed some of the neighbors of the accused and found among these kids "little sympathy for the victim." Said a twelve-year-old: "She had nothing to guard herself; she didn't have no man with her; she didn't have no Mace." Added another sixth-grader: "It is like she committed suicide."

There is a rather large difference between suicide and homicide. For some, the distinction is not obvious. They must be taught. If not taught, they grow up in a moral vacuum. Moral vacuums produce moral monsters.

Young monsters. The attackers are all 14 to 17. Their youth is yet another source of mitigation. In addition to class and racial disadvantage, we must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage.

Spare us the Garlanding. The rage in this case properly belongs to the victim, to her family and to us.