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offense, crime rates plummet. The same goes for “three strikes” laws that incarcerate repeat offenders for life.
    When it comes to sentencing, academic distinctions between nonviolent and violent crime are less important than pinpointing the
type
of criminal at the docket. The otherwise law-abiding jerk who commits a one-time assault during a bar brawl is of much less threat to society than is the supposedly nonviolent con man who’s been preying on marks for two decades, because you can bet the con man has committed scores of felonies in addition to con games that have never come to light. You can also bet he’s unlikely to have much compunction about using violence if it suits his purposes.
    During a recent visit to a California state hospital for the criminally insane, I learned that the number of psychopaths trying to fake insanity has mushroomed because the bad guys are running scared from the state’s “three strikes” law. Though psychopaths are less affected by fear and punishment than normal people, they do respond to the threat of negative consequences that are
severe and relatively immediate.
Nebulous or long-term risks are likely to have little or no effect upon them because they have a great deal of difficulty, perhaps biologically mediated, in dealing with time and in connecting distant consequences to their behavior (20–22). For that reason, the death penalty as it is carried out in contemporary America, with decades passing between the imposition of sentence and execution, is unlikely to serve as an effective deterrent. However, societies where execution is carried out swiftly, such as Saudi Arabia, have found the death penalty to be extremely effective. The deterrent capabilities of capital punishment are also illustrated historically by social changes that occurred in Elizabethan England when hanging was discontinued as a punishment for a host of crimes, including pickpocketing, due to humanitarian agitation. The almost immediate result was a huge rise in the rate of pickpocketing.
    But debates about the death penalty are so emotionally laden that they tend to serve as red herrings, distracting us from preventive solutions. The most effective way to fight violent crime in the short term is to focus upon habitually violent people when they are very young and not to get distracted by social theorizing that leads nowhere.
    Unfortunately, once again our tendency to empathize gets in the way. After Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden were apprehended, Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, said, “It makes me angry not so much at individual children that have done it as much as angry at a world in which such a thing can happen” (23).
    Kindhearted sentiment. Perhaps sincere, or maybe just an attempt by the gov to come across as warm and fuzzy.
    Either way, inane.
    The
world
didn’t fire 134 bullets at innocent children and teachers; two
individuals
did. And we’d better pay close attention to them and to others like them in order to learn what created them and how to handle them.
    Johnson and Golden’s tender age led to much discussion about the ultimate disposition of their fates. The notion of an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old locked up for life tugs at our heartstrings, and legions of experts exist who are willing to testify that such boys should not be held responsible for their acts because they are mentally ill, and that because of their youth they can be rehabilitated. But any doctors attempting to promulgate a defense based on diminished mental capacity for the type of calculated, well-planned violence accomplished by Golden and Johnson would be at best in error and at worst perjurers in the service of fat fees and prime-time exposure.
    In terms of the possibility of rehabilitation, no one can say for sure, but bear in mind that experts are notoriously poor predictors of future violence and that, given the risks, the most sensible criteria to