MALICIOUS INTENT

Sean Mactire. MALICIOUS INTENT: A Writer's Guide to How Murderers, Robbers, Rapists and Other Criminals Think. Writer's Digest, 1995.

It is dated, and I ignored the less than useful arguments about vampirism and blood lust and crime as illness. I also omitted the chapters I am not interested in--terrorism, cults, kids, career criminals, gangsters, drugs, women. Which seems like a lot of omitting. I feel my info gathered from experience in corrections, and more from television--Law & Order, Without A Trace, Cold Cases, etc is stronger than this source. 

I was looking for ways to improve my manuscript IN YOUR DREAMS, especially for ways to improve the villain(s), and I got some ideas. Organized/disorganized. Psychopath, psychotic, and personality disorders. Good. The point about all family members and others within the victim's circle are also victims. Good. The idea that profiling the victim is just as important as profiling the possible criminal. Good. This book still uses the term "rape" if, when replaced by "sexual assault", makes it obvious that the crime is not about sex. Sex is just another tool to use to harm or attempt to control. Not new. That most criminals can be described as having some form of "arrested development" makes sense. They all put themselves first, like adolescents. The fact that there is absolutely no reference to incarceration, to the difference between punishment (penitentiary) and reform (corrections) never comes into it. Nor the idea that any criminal can change. The word "cognitive" does not appear. "Coping mechanisms" are mentioned. The wide-spread interest in crime and true crime suggests fear, but also that we are all very interested in "the dark side of human nature" but would rather not have to go there ourselves.