How to Prevent
VIOLENT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
in the Next Generation
by Jordan Riak1995
Copyright is waived on this publication.This publication is available as a 16-page booklet from
Parents and Teachers Against
Violence in Education (PTAVE)
P.O. Box 1033, Alamo, CA 94507-7033Recommended donation: $10 for 20 booklets--please add $1.50 for postage
How to Prevent
VIOLENT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
in the Next Generation"The child's inclination to cooperation is challenged from the very first day. The immense importance of the mother in this respect can be clearly recognized. She stands on the threshold of the development of social feeling. The biological heritage of social feeling is entrusted to her charge. She can strengthen or hinder contact by the help she gives the child in little things, in bathing him, in providing all that a helpless infant is in need of. Her relations with the child, her knowledge, and her aptitude are decisive factors.... It may readily be accepted that contact with the mother is of the highest importance for the development of human social feeling.... We probably owe to the maternal sense of contact the largest part of human social feeling, and along with it the essential continuance of human civilization."1
Alfred Adler
"Becoming a biological parent, parentage, is a matter of a few minutes; becoming a responsible parent, parenthood, is something else again, a matter of adequate preparation.... Every birth should be regarded as a contribution to society as well as to the family and to the child that has been born. A gift to be treated with gratitude and reverence, so that every child may be from birth assured of the optimum conditions for development and fulfillment. Anything short of this is to disinherit the newborn of his birthright and to deprive his society of a cooperating and contributing member."2
Ashley Montagu
One of the worst diseases that ever ravaged humanity was smallpox. There was a time when about one in five who became infected died and almost everyone became infected. Survivors were left scarred and sometimes blind. In those days, no one could have foreseen that a simple procedure, vaccination, would eventually provide protection to everyone and cause the eradication of smallpox from the earth.
The smallpox virus and criminal behavior have several features in common. Both affect only the human species. Both are spread infectiously from one person to the next. Both are preventable by making the potential host immune. Once eliminated, neither spontaneously regenerates.
Today it is equally possible to immunize a child against criminality as against smallpox.
How can it be done?We can answer this question by examining our prison population and determining who's not present. We must ask, is there a common ingredient in the lives of those who don't become criminals, and is also consistently absent from the lives of those who do become criminals?
The answer is yes, there is. This key ingredient, this precious stuff that seems to be associated exclusively with people who never become candidates for the penitentiary, has been identified. And there is no reason that it cannot be introduced universally. When that is done, crime and violence will go the way of smallpox.
Who's not in prison?The person whose closest caretakers used methods of infant care and child rearing that were gentle, patient and loving is not in prison. The person who sensed from earliest infancy that adults are the source of safety, security and comfort is not in prison. The person who always felt wanted is not in prison. The person who was respected, encouraged to explore and inquire is not in prison. The person who grew up seeing family members and others treat each other with respect and honor each other's privacy and dignity is not in prison. The person who had ample exposure in childhood to people who used reasoning, not violence, to solve problems is not in prison. The person whose physical and emotional needs during infancy and childhood were met is not in prison. To summarize: The child who is reared in an attentive, supportive, nonviolent family will never spend time behind bars.
To the skeptical reader, I offer the following challenge. Visit any prison and try to identify just one incarcerated felon who was brought up in a household where harmonious interaction was the norm. You will not succeed.
Who is in prison?You will find people who were born into households where every other adult family member, including older siblings, had the right to inflict whippings at whim, and often did. You will find people who in childhood were never cuddled, hugged, played with, protected, guided, comforted, soothed, read to, listened to or tucked in, but mainly growled at, barked at, insulted, smacked and ignored. You will find people who never had a single possession that was not subject to being wrenched away by somebody stronger. You will find people who grew up in families where the late-night sound of someone whipping a colicky infant with a wire coat hanger was nothing out of the ordinary. You will find people who in childhood, even in infancy, were targets for adults' sexual appetites. You will find people who, throughout their developmental years, were rarely or never touched by any hand except in ways that frighten, hurt and leave bruises.
Dr. Morris Wessel puts it this way: "Beaten and battered children are more likely to become adults who have inadequate control of their aggressive feelings, who therefore strike out mercilessly against children, spouses, friends and at times even other members of society. The violence inflicted on children by their closest relatives and caretakers has a long-lasting and horrifying effect. These children grow up with the idea that, when another person's behavior is displeasing to them, violent acts against that person are appropriate ways to deal with feelings of displeasure. In short, members of each adult generation tend to reproduce in their interpersonal relationships the violence which they experienced in their childhood."3
In the same vein, Dr. Philip Greven writes: "The most visible public outcome of early violence and coercion in the name of discipline is the active aggression that begins to shape the character and behavior in childhood and continues, in far too many instances, throughout the lives of those who suffered most in their earliest years. Aggressive children often become aggressive adults who often produce more aggressive children, in a cycle that endures generation after generation. Corporal punishments always figure prominently in the roots of adolescent and adult aggressiveness, especially in those manifestations that take antisocial form, such as delinquency and criminality."4
Blaming povertyMany experts blame violence and criminality on poverty. This is the standard view among advocates for the disadvantaged. But the theory falls apart the moment we attempt to apply it to violence and criminality among the affluent. Consider the Mafia. The source of their bad behavior has nothing to do with the state of their finances, but everything to do with how they were treated as children.
"...And later, when I got to meet their kids, I was amazed at how much trouble the kids gave them. The kids were always in trouble. They were always in fights. They wouldn't go to school. They'd disappear from home. The women would beat their kids blue with broom handles and leather belts, but the kids wouldn't pay any attention..." Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, p. 73.
The real culpritMistreatment of children beginning at infancy, perpetrated by parents and other primary caretakers, is what infects children with the virus of violence. In much the same way that it interferes with the bonding process between child and parent, it stunts the child's ability to become socially integrated with the larger law-abiding community. It handicaps the child with a lifetime supply of anger. It makes every future irritation seem a mortal attack; every delay of gratification, a personal insult. It models for the child no essential problem-solving skills, but instead: selfishness, aggression, rage, tyranny. It makes escape by means of drugs and alcohol appealing options, irresistible to many. The worse and the earlier the mistreatment, the more severe the outcome.
Researchers Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck have found that the first indicators of delinquency are usually recognizable in children between the ages of 3 and 6, and almost always before 11.5 Yet programs and services that purport to address the delinquency problem almost invariably are aimed at adolescents and young adults. Obviously such programs are of no value to the babies still at home, being abused and neglected, for whom intervention now would make all the difference later. As for parents whose children have been removed by the courts for their safety, and who are required to take parenting classes as a condition for being reunited with their children, such intervention comes only after the damage has been done. In many cases, that's too late to significantly benefit either child or parent.
Precisely because their most urgent needs are not met, abused infants grow into adults who remain fixated on their own feelings of frustration. Such people have difficulty recognizing anyone's needs other than their own. When they become parents, they are unable to cope with the demands placed on them by an infant. They remain at a stage of arrested development, all the while searching for relief from the chronic anger that derives from events impossible for them to remember -- anger that smolders beneath the surface and erupts all too easily when a defenseless target comes within arm's reach.
Being deprived babies themselves, and feeling rudely displaced by their own offspring, they are spontaneously hostile to them. They spank as naturally as they were spanked. They bully their growing children as they were bullied. They produce damaged children who in turn become inept parents who produce more damaged children.
When such a pattern is the norm in society, the courts stay busy and the prisons stay filled.
Condoning violence against childrenOur laws and cultural values are unambiguous concerning adults who physically attack or threaten other adults. Such behavior is recognized as criminal and we hold the perpetrators accountable. Why then, when so much is at stake for society, do we accept the excuses of child batterers? Why do we become interested in the needs of children only after they have been terribly victimized, or have become delinquents victimizing others?
The answer is not complicated. Until we can honestly acknowledge the mistreatment we've experienced in our own childhood and examine the shortcomings of our own parents, we will be incapable of feeling sympathy for any child abused as we were. To the extent we feel compelled to defend our parents and guard their secrets, we will do the same for others. We will look the other way. By insisting that we "turned out OK" we are really trying to reassure ourselves and to divert our own attention from deeply unpleasant memories.
That's why, when someone says, "spanking is abuse," many of us react as though a door that has been locked since infancy is about to be flung open, a door that has prevented us from committing the most dangerous, most unpardonable act of disloyalty imaginable: disloyalty to the parent. We fear that by unlocking that door we might fall through into an abyss, abandoned, cut off from any possibility of reconciliation with the parents we love.
That fear is irrational. Dishonesty about what was done to our generation and what we are doing, and allowing to be done, to the next generation, is the real danger and the real sin.
Reconciliation and healing can only begin with an acknowledgment of the truth, for it is futile to hope that lies, evasions and excuses can somehow erase the memory and the pain of past injuries.
THREE STEPS TOWARD A SOLUTIONRepeal bad laws
We should rescind legislation regarding children's status that is based on the mythical distinction between spanking and battery. Every state in the U.S. has such laws.
There can be no rational excuse for giving children less protection against battery than adults have. Because of such exclusions and the anti-child prejudices they reinforce, children in the United States today receive no better legal protection against cruel treatment than did slaves prior to emancipation. Now is the time to repeal the Jim Crow laws against children and extend to them the same constitutional guarantees that are taken for granted by every other class of citizen.
Educate for parenthoodThe person who was raised by incompetents, never witnessed competent parenting and has been taught nothing about the needs and nurturing of infants is seriously educationally deprived. Such a person poses a far greater potential problem for society than the person who has not learned to read or calculate. Enlightened educators must finally assume the responsibility for preparing young people for their most important role in life: parenthood.
Counsel new parentsAll new parents should receive sound advice about nurturing, nonviolent parenting.
Programs for counseling, monitoring and early intervention with high-risk parents, similar to the one now in place in Hawaii, should be implemented everywhere. Families deemed high-risk should be enrolled in programs of ongoing counseling and home monitoring. Where needed, skilled counselors should help convince mothers and fathers, grandparents and other caretakers that the traditional examples they have been shown and the advice they have been given about "disciplining" children are bad examples and bad advice.
In cases where babies need to be rescued, it should be done with a minimum of delay. Experience has taught us that when we fail to protect them early, we pay a hundredfold later.
ConclusionWe are confident that our society will find the moral courage to end its denial of this simple and terrible truth: Violent criminals are made. We ourselves create them at home.
Clearly, the solution does not lie in more prisons and swifter, harsher punishments nor in heroic efforts to rehabilitate profoundly damaged, dangerous adults. By now we should have had enough of these high-cost, low-yield, after-the-fact remedies. Honest answers lie in true understanding of the disease at its source, active prevention and compassionate early intervention.
1. Alfred Adler, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1939) quoted in Ashley Montagu, Man Observed, New York: Tower Publications 1971, p. 65.
2. Ibid., p. 45.
3. Communication to the author from Dr. Morris Wessel, Professor of Pediatric Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine.
4. Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 193-194.
5. Sheldon Glueck,"Ten Years of Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency: An Examination of Criticisms," in Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, Ventures in Criminology: Collected Recent Papers (London:Travistock Publications, 1964), p. 285.
RECOMMENDED READINGCrosby, Gary, Going My Own Way. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983. Especially see Chapter Two, "Getting it."
Gibson, Ian, The English Vice. London: Duckworth, 1978.
Gilmore, Mikal, Shot in the Heart. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1994.
Greven, Philip, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. New York: Random House, 1991.
Hyman, I. A., Reading, Writing and the Hickory Stick: The Appalling Story of Physical and Psychological Violence in American Schools. Boston: Lexington Books, 1990.
Johnson, Tom, The Sexual Dangers of Spanking Children Booklet available from PTAVE. Access later through Table of Contents or read now.
Miller, Alice, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1983.
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
. . ., Banished Knowledge. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
. . .,Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. New York: Dutton,1991.
Montagu, Ashley, Man Observed. New York: Tower Publications,1971. Especially see Chapter 3, "Crime and Society."
Riak, Jordan, Plain Talk about Spanking. Booklet available from PTAVE. Access later through Table of Contents or read now.
. . .,Hablando francamente sobre el pegarles a los niņos. Booklet available from PTAVE. Access later through Table of Contents or read now.
Straus, Murray A., Beating the Devil out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families. New York: Free Press, 1994.
De Zulueta, Felicity, From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1994
IN THE MEDIAThe following material is offered as background to the argument for nurturing, violence-free child rearing.
MINISTER'S HOME
SPAWNS 4 VIOLENT SONS
Ventura County city ponders tale of 3 brothers convicted of rape, 1 of assault By Carol Bidwell, Los Angeles Daily News (San Francisco Examiner, 12-26-93)OXNARD, Ventura County - Violence by four brothers has spanned a dozen years, bewildering prosecutors, police and even friends and family members who say the men -- sons of a minister -- grew up in a loving Christian home.
The Rev. Samuel Chester Jr., pastor of a church in the Ventura County coastal city of Oxnard, and his Christian missionary wife, Edna, reared their six sons and two daughters with religious training, strict discipline, regular chores and church activities.
Yet three of the sons are convicted rapists whose violent attacks in many cases were committed against elderly women. A fourth brother faces a prison sentence for robbing and pistol-whipping a retired police officer. Outside the courtroom earlier this month, a subdued Edna Chester was at a loss after seeing her third son convicted of rape.
"It's just like his brothers," she said. "All three of them. I don't know what else there is to say."
The two deputy district attorneys who prosecuted Leonard, Samuel Cornell and Dale Chester say the brothers need to be locked up.
Bad seed?"Some people are going to say it's the bad seed, it's genetic, but I don't believe it," said Deputy District Attorney Matt Hardy, who prosecuted Leonard Chester.
"There are not genetic propensities that would make people rape," he said. "It has to be the way they were brought up. There has to be something in their background that gave them a very, very dangerous hatred for women."
Experts in sexual abuse cases say rapists often were abused as children or saw their mothers abused. But police and prosecutors found no such evidence in the case of the Chesters.
The Rev. Austin Dillon Sr., retired pastor of Oxnard's Greater Hope Church of God in Christ, speculated that the Chester brothers had been sheltered too much as children, and thus were unprepared when they grew up.
"I've known these kids all their lives," the retired minister said. "I've seen them grow up. They were very respectful children."
Dillon recently retired and was succeeded by Samuel Chester Jr., the patriarch of the family.
The four brothersLeonard Chester, 32, is serving a 44-year sentence at Pelican Bay State Prison for raping three Oxnard women, trying to rape a fourth and robbing all four.
Samuel Cornell Chester, 29, is serving a 35-year sentence at Calapatria State Prison for raping and robbing two Oxnard women,a mother and daughter.
Dale Chester, 22, was sentenced last week to three years in prison for raping a Camarillo woman -- pregnant with his brother Ruben's child.
And Ruben Chester, 24, faces 17 years behind bars when he is sentenced Feb. 3 for robbing and assaulting three people at a San Bernadino County gas station.
All four brothers and their father refused requests for interviews. Edna Chester refused to discuss her sons, but spoke briefly about the Chesters' family life.
"We're trying to lead a Christian life," she said. "We know that, and God knows that."
"When they got out in the outside world, they took the wrong route," Dillon said. "It's like you keep a little dog in the back yard and he's never been out on the streets and he gets out and he gets run over."
Leonard Chester was 20 in 1981 when he was convicted of raping three women at knife-point and trying to rape a fourth. The victims were ages 27, 60, 69, 74. The oldest of the women was crippled.
Strong on disciplineBest-selling novelist Nancy Taylor Rosenberg was Leonard Chester's probation officer. She recalls that the Chesters were strong on discipline.
"He was the best kid I had," Edna Chester is quoted assaying in the probation officer's report. "He did not hold a grudge. I could whip him and whip him, but in 30 minutes he would be laughing and talking."
Prosecutor Hardy was struck by Leonard's lack of remorse: "The arrogance of his inhumanity is overpowering." he told the judge.
In a letter to the judge, Samuel Chester said he was sorry and blamed his actions on drugs -- alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy.
"I've carried my drug addiction with me since I was in my teenagerhood, believing I was still normal, living a human being life," Samuel wrote, asking for drug rehabilitation.
Roland Summitt, a psychiatrist who heads the Department of Community Consultation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, and Rex Beaber, a lawyer and psychologist appointed by the courts to evaluate sex offenders before sentencing, said they never before had heard of a family in which three brothers committed violent rapes.
Clinical studies of violent rapists suggest that sexual attacks are most often the outgrowth of violence at home. "The rape of an older woman, who you have to have sexual control over and you have to rob and defile, is a pretty sadistic pattern, "Summitt said.
In her talks with Leonard Chester, Rosenberg said he had told her he and his brothers were expected not only to bottle up any sexual impulses, but not to have sexual thoughts at all.
"I did get the impression that they felt sexual thoughts were sinful," she said.
Hardy said he had gone to the Chester home in 1982 with Oxnard police while they served the search warrant that turned up items taken by Leonard Chester from his victims' homes.
"There was no evidence of neglect or abuse," he said. "There wasn't any of that. These looked like any kids who were well cared-for. The parents had the ties to the community and had at least provided the material things we're told help to keep kids from a life of crime. It was like any middle-class kind of a house."
He said police had found "a lot of pornography, hard-core stuff," in Leonard's room.
Dillon said Edna and Samuel Chester Jr., reared in Mississippi with him, had suffered greatly.
"It's really been hard on them," he said. "They seem to think their children are being picked on."
A TORTURED BOY GREW INTO A KILLING MONSTER
By Kevin Leary, San Francisco Chronicle, 1-17-90Lawyers for condemned killer, Robert Alton Harris, claim that he has changed since 1978, when he shot two teenage boys in San Diego and laughed at their death agonies as he finished the hamburgers his victims had been eating just before they died.
After 11 years on San Quentin's death row, Harris, 37, is genuinely sorry for the cold-blooded murders and is "not the man misidentified by the media in 1978 as human garbage, or in court in 1978-79 as a sociopathic-loner incapable of learning from punishment," wrote San Diego attorneys Charles M. Sevilla and Michael J. McCabe.
Maybe so, but many believe his crimes were so cruel and calculated that the "laughing killer" richly deserves to be the first person executed in California in 23 years.
"He absolutely has it coming," said Deputy Attorney LouHanoian, who is handling the case for the state. "He is a convicted murderer with a record as long as your arm. He cold-bloodedly murdered those two boys and killed another man before them."
In a petition to the California Supreme Court earlier this month asking that Harris' life be spared, Sevilla and McCabe cited the terrible conditions of his abused childhood as an explanation, perhaps even a mitigation, of the awful crimes he admits.
They described the imprisoned Harris as "friendly, outgoing, gregarious, even-tempered... a generous giver, always looking for a way to make someone else's life a little more bearable, a little easier."
Hanoian dismissed the claims that Harris has changed or reformed. "The fact that he has performed well in San Quentin means nothing," he said. "Many of them on death row behave remarkably well because they have appeals pending and they want to have a clean record when they go before the court or the governor for clemency."
On July 5, 1978, Harris, then 26, and his 18-year-old brother, Daniel, decided to steal a getaway car for a holdup they planned at a branch of the San Diego Trust and Savings Bank. By chance they came upon John Mayeski, 15, and Michael Baker, 16,both high school sophomores, sitting in a green Ford LTD in a parking lot eating Jack-in-the-Box burgers.
Armed with a 9mm Luger automatic pistol, Robert Harris commandeered Mayseki's car and ordered him to drive to a wooded area near Miramar Lake. He promised them no one would be hurt.
Brother testifiedDaniel Harris, who became the chief prosecution witness against his brother, followed in another car. He testified that they drove to the lake, where Robert Harris fired two rounds into Mayeski, then went after Baker who was running for his life.
"I went over the Mayeski boy (after he was shot). I looked at him for three or four seconds, I guess... I heard some screaming from the bushes, then three or four shots," said Daniel, who served 3 1/2 years in federal prison for his role in the bank robbery.
Later, after he was arrested, Robert Harris boasted to a cellmate that he told the terrified Baker boy to "quit crying and die like a man." When the boy started to pray, Harris said, "God can't help you now, boy; you're going to die."
After killing the two boys, according to testimony, the Harris brothers drove to a girlfriend's apartment, where Robert finished the rest of the murdered boys' half-eaten hamburgers and flicked bits of gore from his pistol barrel. He laughed and bragged about how he had killed them and giggled at what it would be like to be a police officer telling the victims' families that the boys had been murdered.
About an hour later, wearing maroon ski masks over their faces, the Harrises held up the crowded Mira Mesa branch of the San Diego Trust and Savings Bank and fled with about $3,000.
By coincidence, one of the San Diego police officers to arrest the Harrises a few hours later was an undercover officer Steven Baker, father of the boy who was shot point blank while he begged for mercy. The father had been granted permission to attend the Harris execution.
The double murder was not the first time Harris had killed someone. In 1975 he beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old James Leslie Wheeler of Seeley in Imperial County. He was convicted of manslaughter and served two years and five month in prison before being paroled six months before he killed Baker and Mayeski.
If there were a manual on how to create a human monster, it could be modeled on Harris' childhood.
Hunted by fatherHarris' Sister, Barbara Mason, remembers many episodes of their father going into the family bedroom loading all of his guns and yelling, "You have 30 minutes to go hide." In court documents filed on behalf of her brother, Mason said she would grab the baby and all the kids would run into the fields and hide. "Robbie would be so scared (he would) crap his pants."
Barbara Mason said, "If the baby (had) started crying, I would have to kill it, or he would find me and kill us both." Her father "never found us... our lives depended on it."
When Robbie was about 2, his father punched him so hard he knocked him out of his high chair, Mason said. "He was in convulsions and there was blood coming out of his mouth, his nose, his ears... (the father) started strangling Robbie with a tablecloth and he was choking him and he said, 'Oh, lookie, Evelyn, your baby is bleeding to death.' "
As he was growing up, Harris' father beat him into unconsciousness several times, Mason said. And at the dinner table, if the little boy reached for something without his father's permission, "he would end up with a fork in the back of his hand."
"Once Robert fell down on some rocks and came running home to mother, bleeding with a tooth knocked out, and she said something like 'Now you look like the idiot you are,' " Mason said.
At the age of 13, after the family had broken up, when Harris and his mother were working as migrant laborers, picking strawberries in Modesto, she "told me I wasn't working hard enough... and told me to hit the road," Harris recalled in an interview last year. Harris said he gathered his few possessions and walked up the road, then sat down and waited. His mother and her boyfriend then got into their car and drove off, leaving young Harris in the dust.
"My mom just beeped the horn and waived at me and kept going," he said. After that, he was on his own.
That concluded a childhood that one psychiatrist who examined Harris in December said "resembled in many respects a prisoner of war camp; at its worst, it resembled an active war zone."
Dr. H. Wesley Clark of San Francisco, who evaluated Harris' mental condition, said in court documents that "Mr. Harris' childhood would score a 9.0 on a Richter scale for traumatic stress."
Life of crimeHe started his criminal career at 15 and spent the rest of his live involved in theft, violence and murder. Most of his life since 1968 has been spent behind bars for theft, parole violations, escape, bank robbery, kidnapping, manslaughter and finally murder.
His mother, Evelyn, died of cancer at the age of 54 after a sorry life that included a botched 1977 bank robbery in Porterville, Tulare County, which she attempted in a drunken stupor.
Harris' father, Kenneth, twice jailed for molesting two of his five daughters, committed suicide on April 29, 1989.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
If David Mason Keeps Tuesday's Date With the Gas Chamber, a Life of Torment and Violence will Have Come Full Circle
by Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times, 8-22-93Oakland -- Death has shadowed David Edwin Mason all his life. As a child growing up here, he tried to commit suicide countless times: choking himself, setting his clothes on fire, swallowing pills, cutting himself and throwing himself down a set of stairs.
Later, it was easier to kill others: the elderly woman who befriended him as a boy, the two aging widows who lived by themselves in their Oakland apartments, the prisoner who was placed with him in his jail cell.
"I know I am going to die, and I don't care," Mason proclaimed in a tape-recorded "epitaph" as he prepared to shoot it out with police before his arrest in 1981. "In a way, I'm looking forward to it."
Now, at the age of 36, the eldest son of strict fundamentalist Christians says his turn has finally come. After nine years on Death Row, he has volunteered to die Tuesday in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison.
Convicted of murdering five people, Mason is the first inmate in California to abandon his legal appeals and willingly go to his execution. Unless he changes his mind, he will be the second person in 29 years put to death by the state.
During his life in prison, Mason says he has come to regret this violent crimes and to understand the pain he caused his victims' families. He no longer has a death wish, he says, but accepts responsibility for his actions and believes his sentence is just.
His former attorney, Charles Marson, filed a long-shot appeal challenging his mental stability. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Mason is competent to choose to die and legal experts expect the ruling to stand.
Unlike California's last execution, 16 months ago -- when Robert Alton Harris became the first person to die in the gas chamber in 25 years -- there is no great clamor for vengeance among the relatives of Mason's victims.
In fact the most outspoken family member, Dolly Lundberg, says she has exchanged letters with Mason and forgiven him for murdering her aged mother, Joan Pickard, 13 years ago.
When the cyanide gas finally fills the glass-walled chamber, and Mason draws his last breath, it will be the end of a cold-blooded killer who preyed on the weak and elderly, sometimes strangling his victims with his hands.
It will also conclude the final chapter in the saga of a sad and lonely boy who was unwanted at birth and routinely beaten by his parents.
Medical reports, school records, probation reports and recent court declarations filed by Mason's sister paint a grim picture of his childhood and the Mason household, where strict adherence to rules was required, hugging and laughing were prohibited and punishment was swift and merciless.
David was one of eight children of steel worker Harris Mason and his wife, Margie, who moved from Georgia to Oakland soon after David was born.
When Margie became pregnant with David, she and Harris already had three daughters under the age of 2. She tried to induce a miscarriage by lifting heavy furniture and riding horses.
"My mother made it clear to all of us, including David, that David was an unwanted child," said Darlene Mason Hill, an older sister, in her declaration. "I remember being very young and hearing her say she wished David had never been born." Both parents have declined to be interviewed about their son.
At 5, David attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills and setting his cloths on fire. Margie sought to put him up for adoption, but her husband refused to part with his first born son.
All the Mason children were beaten with a switch for minor infractions, but David was the family scapegoat and often was singled out for the harshest treatment. Harris Mason later testified: "I used a belt on (David) whenever the occasion called for." Margie Mason acknowledged she beat him with a "belt, a switch or a pancake turner."
Even so, David became more difficult to control. He set fires at his church and school and, at 8, was found standing over his baby brother's crib with a knife. His parents resorted to locking him in a room called "the dungeon" -- a bedroom with the windows nailed shut. They ignored psychologists' recommendations that the family receive counseling.
When David was 11 and defecated in his pants, his mother pinned a baby's soiled diapers on him and made him wear his feces-encrusted underwear on his head, she acknowledged in court. On another occasion his father strapped him to a workbench, gagged him with a cloth and beat him unconscious, according to court documents.
School documents show Mason has a slightly above-average I.Q. of 110. But physically he was slow to mature and his family called him "inchworm" because of his small penis.
When he was 14, a school counselor warned: "He is in desperate need of help if he is to straighten out, to develop emotional security and friendly feelings for his fellow man before it is too late."
Despite such findings by school officials, probation officers and doctors, no agency intervened in Mason's life -- a source of lingering bitterness to him now as he contemplates his death.
His parents finally dealt with him by sending him to a group foster home for boys and then to juvenile hall. He ran away several times and returned home with claims that he had been sexually abused by other youth or administrators.
Some of the hardships of Mason's childhood were presented as mitigating factors at his 1983 death penalty hearing. But Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Taber rejected the argument and concluded that Mason "had the benefit of loving parents and a typical childhood."
At age 16, Mason was convicted of setting a house on fire. At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps but was drummed out as unfit in less than three months.
Three years later, in 1977 he was arrested for robbing a San Leandro store and stabbing a female clerk in the back with an ice pick. He was sent to prison for three years and served a little more that half his sentence.
When he got out of prison in 1979, Mason returned to the East Bay. He had a new tattoo on his arm that said "Weiss Macht," German for "White Power," and soon embarked on a deadly crime spree.
During the next year and a half, he killed and robbed five people and committed at least five other robberies or attempted robberies before he was caught in February 1981.
Excerpt from Mr. Paddock's follow-up article appearing 8-25-93, after Mason's execution:
".... This act of courage, being strapped in the chair and going out without a whimper, was for Dave the one act that could get him respect," said his attorney, Mike Brady, who could not hold back his tears as he witnessed the execution. "And he had to give his life to do it... It was very difficult for me to watch Dave still struggling for his mother's love right down to the last minute," Brady said bitterly. "It took her 36 years, but she finally got rid of David Mason. I could see him wanting his mother to love him just once before he died...."
At one point, the abuse Mason suffered prompted Brady to suggest there ought to be three chairs in the gas chamber, one for Mason and two for his parents.
PASTOR, 2 PARISHIONERS
INDICTED IN WHIPPING
OF 11-YEAR-OLD BOY
By Jennifer Liebrum, Houston Chronicle 2-16-94A Houston pastor and two of his parishioners were indicted Tuesday for allegedly whipping a boy with a belt, stick and wooden paint paddle after his mother asked for help disciplining him.
The 11-year-old's wounds were so severe they were still bleeding when he went to school the next day, said prosecuting attorney Denise Oncken.
School officials immediately notified Children's Protective Services officials, who took the boy into custody.
The boy suffered from extensive cuts, bruising and swelling all over his body, legs, back and neck, said Oncken, chief of the district attorney's Child Abuse Division.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the boy's mother,who is raising the child alone, had relied on Holy Ghost Church pastor Victor Boutte, 48, to help control and counsel him, Onckensaid.
On Dec. 13, Boutte allegedly enlisted the help of members Eric Jackson, 22 and Mark Pool, 28, to punish the boy.
The two are accused of holding the boy's arms and legs while Boutte administered punishment using a "heavy-duty" wooden paddle normally used to stir paint. In addition, the boy was hit with a belt and a stick, Oncken said.
GIRL FORCED TO DISROBE
THEN PADDLED AT SCHOOL
The Sacramento Bee - 3-26-95, (Arizona Republic)PHOENIX -- The headmaster of a private school has been arrested and accused of forcing a 15-year-old girl to remove her clothing and kneel in prayer while he struck her with a wooden paddle. The girl's mother witnessed the paddling, too frightened to do anything to stop it, Phoenix police said. The three swats left bruises and welts on the girl's buttocks. The teen's 6-year-old sister, waiting in the next room, also heard her sister's cries for help, police said.
The teen was not even a student at the school. Her mother had brought her there to consider enrolling her in September.
Police say Michael William Wetton told the girl during her 75-minute ordeal on Feb. 24 that he wanted her to understand corporal punishment, which is used to discipline students at the school.
Wetton, 41, was arrested Thursday at his Connacht Academy Christian School in northwest Phoenix and booked into Maricopa County jail on suspicion of child abuse, kidnapping and aggravated assault. He is being held without bail.
Police closed the school for the day and called parents of the 30 students to have them take their children home. It was unclear whether the school will reopen. Wetton and his wife are the only teachers at the school.
The Rev. Richard Troy, pastor of the 67th Avenue Baptist Church, which houses the school, said the congregation was to decide today whether to allow the school to continue. He said his church has no connection with the school, but has allowed Wetton to use church classrooms since January.
This is not the first time Wetton has been accused of child abuse. He is facing trial next month for allegedly leaving bruises on the buttocks of a 9-year-old student after a paddling in August. Arizona law allows parents and others in authority to paddle children, as long as they do not use inappropriate force.
After Wetton's arrest, some parents directed anger at the police. The parents said they consider Wetton, an English citizen, a superior teacher who has improved their children's manners and academic performance.
"I am not sure that these aren't trumped-up charges," said Rosemary Rice, a board member of the school and parent of a student.
Cookie O'Kelley, another board member, also is angry over the police action.
"It was ludicrous," she said. "It makes absolutely no sense."
Rice and O'Kelley are defense witnesses for Wetton in his upcoming trial.
O'Kelley, Rice and other parents say they enrolled their children at the academy because they wanted stricter discipline and higher academic standards than public schools provide.Parents must sign a release acknowledging paddling is part of the discipline.
"The Bible says to use the rod," Rice said, adding that the arrest "is an assault on Christian beliefs."
O'Kelley said her 11-year-old son's buttocks were bruised after a paddling, but she believes his punishment was fair. When her son entered the school, she said, he was doing fourth-grade work and now tests at ninth-grade level.
Discussing the case involving the 15-year-old girl, police said her mother took her to the school Feb. 24.
As part of the orientation, Wetton reportedly took the girl into a room alone and told her to take off her clothes. Crying,she removed everything but her bra and panties. Wetton then struck her once with a wooden paddle. Wetton then reportedly forced the girl to disrobe completely, made her kneel as if in prayer and struck her across the buttocks. Then police say, he forced her to grab the edge of a table, spread her legs and submit to another swat. Finally, he made her bow down to him and recite the Lord's Prayer.
GUARDS CLEARED IN MALL BEATING
By Steven R. Reed 6-28-95, Houston Chronicle Dallas BureauDALLAS - A grand jury Tuesday refused to indict five members of the Nation of Islam in the caning and whipping of four boys,who admitted burglarizing an antique store.
Four Nation of Islam security guards were charged the day after the June 12 incident. The leader of the Nation of Islam group that rents office, retail and worship space at the mall where the store is located was charged several days later. Police decided he had directed the whippings.
Police had charged the five men with aggravated kidnapping after the youths, age 12 to 16, told police they were confronted at a mall, held against their will, forced to take off their clothes and to submit to two rounds of beatings with bamboo canes and belts.
The boys said the first round of discipline was administered by four men who serve as security guards at the mall. The boys said they then were forced to run between two lines of as many as 50 other adults who whacked them on the legs, backs and buttocks. All of the boys suffered bruises or cuts but none required hospital treatment. The boys, security guards and unidentified assailants all were black.
After the grand jury results were announced, black community leaders said they would urge police to drop burglary charges against the youths.
"We need to let the healing process begin," said Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who supported the Nation of Islam members. "That's what community is all about."
Price was among many black leaders who said the incident reflected an age-old practice of an entire African village taking responsibility for raising each child.
Police said they appreciated what the men were trying to do in disciplining the boys, but said their actions went too far.
"Still in our judgment the circumstances justified the filing of charges but we fully respect the decision of the grand jury," said police spokesman Ed Spencer.
"Pending any significant developments being brought to our attention, the department does not intend to pursue the investigation any further," he said. The charges against the teenagers stand, he said.
The mother of three of the boys and the stepfather of the other youth criticized the grand jury decision.
"You should not beat no kids, not the way they did," said Bobby Lott, the stepfather.
The incident generated debate across the city, with many people expressing admiration for the actions of the guards and others decrying the whippings as vigilantism.
One of the guards told police who responded to the youths' complaints that he and his colleagues accepted responsibility for what they did.
The guards cleared in the incident were Derick Hopkins, 27, and Stanley Stephen, 23, both of Dallas; and Arlington residents Zavier McFerguson, 30, and Tyrone Miller, 31. Also cleared was Jeffery Jackson, 28, also known as Minister Jeffery Muhammad.
"Minister Jeffrey and all of the young men (defendants) are elated that they were no billed," said defense lawyer James Belt.
He said the defendants had been eager to appear before the grand jurors but were not given the opportunity.
"We wanted the grand jury to see these young men so they wouldn't be demonized," Belt said. "They're upstanding, clean-cut, everyday American young men."
CHURCH SCHOOL OFFICIAL
GUILTY OF ABUSE
by Sylvia Adcock,The Raleigh Times
(Excerpted from initial article on 6-19-84
and follow-up article on 6-20-84.)An administrator for a private church school was found guilty of child abuse today in Wake District Court.
The charges against Raleigh Christian Academy assistant principle Dwight Ausley stemmed from the April 30 paddling of a 10-year-old student for not doing his homework. Ausley, 26, testified that he gave fourth-grader Phillip Smith "five licks" that were very moderate for a boy of his size and his age.
Judge Russell G. Sherrill III found Ausley guilty of child abuse. A charge of simple assault was dismissed. Ausley was given a 15-day suspended jail sentence and was fined $25 and court costs.
Defense attorney Lacy Presnell said, "What this case is about is corporal punishment. If it's the district attorney's argument that this is child abuse, then there can be no legal corporal punishment in this state." Presnell gave notice of appeal to Wake Superior Court.
But Asst. Dist. Atty. Deborah Shandles said Ausley hit the boy so hard that "the child lost his breath and lost his balance and he (Ausley) was so engrossed in the beating he did not notice.... He chose to beat a 10-year-old child to teach him a lesson he would not forget for a long time, all for a homework assignment. That is not an accident, that is malice."
Prosecutor Deborah Shandles said that the bruises Phillip sustained from the paddling lasted three weeks.
Phillip's teacher, Karen Owen, testified that she had asked Ausley to paddle Phillip after he forgot his homework.
On Friday, a prosecutor introduced as evidence as taped sermon from Rev. Randy Cox of First Free Will Baptist Church, the church that is affiliated with Raleigh Christian Academy on Trawick Road.
"Better a son dead than disobedient," Cox said in the sermon.
Raleigh Christian Academy principal Richard L. Tippett said he gave the tape recording to Phillip's Mother, Brenda Smith, after she called him to express concern about the paddling.
Tippett said "Better a son dead than disobedient" is a paraphrase from the Bible.
Tippett said during his second conversation with Mrs. Smith about the paddling, he was told that Phillip's doctor had referred that matter to the Department of Social Services.
When a child comes to his office to be paddled, Tippet said, he first talks to the child about why the punishment is necessary. The paddling itself is usually three to five licks, he said.
"Following the spanking, if there are tears, I give the child a Kleenex. I tell them I love them," Tippet said.
CULT AND CHILD BEATING
by Dudley Clendinen, New York Times, 7-1-84 (Excerpted)ISLAND POND, Vt. - The Church of Island Pond was founded by a former circus barker, Elbert Eugene Spriggs, who had had three marriages and years of drinking before he became a born-again Christian in 1971.
The church evolved from his counseling efforts with troubled teenagers in his native Chattanooga, Tenn.
The church recruits converts. It sends out "walkers" with backpacks to wander New England on foot and by thumb, seeking apprentices. Recruits come, find they are expected to renounce all their possessions with the church and, most often, they leave.
One father who left was Roland Church, who took his family away, he said, after watching his 13-year-old daughter whipped with a slim wooden rod in her underwear at intervals over seven hours. She and her father told state officials she had 89 welts and that she was beaten for "being deceitful" about a bit of sexual exploration with an 8-year-old boy.
Whippings, says Jeff Schneider, 19, a resident of the church for almost four months in 1982, are known as "getting the rod" and that discipline began with group breakfast at 5:30 each morning. "If kids start whining and crying," he said, "They're told to be quiet. If they cry again, they're given a beating. From a very young age, they're taught total obedience."
There are no toys, he said. The children are taught that fantasizing and pretending are wasteful and wrong. The church's word is "dissipating."
Randy Norman, an investigator for the Vermont Attorney General's office, took a statement from Linda M. Kelley, 29, who lived with her daughter in the commune. She told of a 4-year-old Jeremy Smith.
In the church nursery school, she said, Jeremy "pretended that a block that he was playing with was a truck, and he was disciplined on the spot for it" by being struck 10 or 20 times with a rod with his pants pulled down. When he persisted, she said, he was "scourged" -- given two long beatings in two days. At the end, she described him as "weary, weak, spirit broken, pathetic, repentant, just kind of dry sobs, just broken, pale."
Bill Smith, 28, lean, long-haired and bearded like most men of the church, teaches its children and is the father of two boys and a girl. He said he graduated from Boca Ciega High School and Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.
"I'd say we discipline more than the American society considers normal because we don't see it having a bad effect," he said.
EXPERTS AREN'T CALLING
KORESH AN ABUSER
Children were subject to tough discipline, sex talks
by Laura Tolley, Associated Press, Contra Costa Times, 5-5-93HOUSTON -- A lawyer who talked to survivors of a religious cult's 51-day standoff with federal agents said Wednesday that parents used "Christian discipline" but didn't beat children inside the compound.
A psychiatrist who led a team counseling the 21 children who left the compound during the standoff said Tuesday the children were subject to beatings with a wooden paddle for minor mishaps. But he stopped short of calling the Branch Davidian cult's leader, David Koresh, a child abuser.
Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor College of Medicine also said there were explicit sexual discussions in front of the children.
He said the children knew the girls -- as young as 11 or 12 -- were considered sexual partners. But he would not call that knowledge abuse, only that it was "abusive."
An attorney said Wednesday that some of the nine cult members who survived the inferno that ended the siege have told him the children weren't abused.
"They saw their mothers discipline their children," said attorney Jack Zimmermann, who went inside the compound during the siege to discuss legal issues with the Branch Davidians.
He said the cult members never used the word "beatings" to describe the discipline. "The term used was Christian discipline,'." Zimmermann said. "The children were taught the meaning of the word 'no.'... Discipline is not abuse."
Zimmermann also said that during his trips to the compound, he never saw any evidence of child abuse. "I saw kids who appeared to be well-fed, they were well-clothed, they were clean," he said.
The following excerpt is from an Oprah Winfrey television broadcast. Subject: children abused in the name of religion. (Broadcast date unknown.)
Cult Member: "If God said chastise him with the rod and I put the rod on him, you mean to tell me God would hold me responsible for doing something He told me to do in His word? I wouldn't be responsible for that, that would be God."
Interviewer: "God told you to kill him?"
Cult Member: "No, no. God said put the rod on his back. Now if that rod was connected with his death, that would be God, would not me, because God has told me to apply it."
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