Lonnie H. Athens' path-breaking work examines a problem that has baffled experts and the general public alike: How does a person become a predatory violent criminal? In the original edition, the process that Athens labeled "violentization" encompassed four stages: brutalization, defiance, dominative engagements, and virulency. In this edition, Athens identifies a new final stage, violent predation, as the culmination of the violent criminal's development. He uses vivid first-person accounts gleaned from in-depth interviews and participant observation of nascent and hardened violent criminals to back up his theory. In this vastly expanded edition, Athens examines how his thinking and ideas have evolved over the past thirty years and renames and clarifies two stages of development. Athens also addresses, for the first time, criticisms of his original theory. Milestones of this important work are discussed, as well as the paradoxes surrounding its present-day status in the field of criminology. Athens proposes a revised theoretical model that will be useful for classroom use, as well as for interested general readers and professionals.

Lonnie H. Athens' path-breaking work examines a problem that has baffled experts and the general public alike: How does a person become a predatory violent criminal? In the original edition, the process that Athens labeled "violentization" encompassed four stages: brutalization, defiance, dominative engagements, and virulency. In this edition, Athens identifies a new final stage, violent predation, as the culmination of the violent criminal's development. He uses vivid first-person accounts gleaned from in-depth interviews and participant observation of nascent and hardened violent criminals to back up his theory. In this vastly expanded edition, Athens examines how his thinking and ideas have evolved over the past thirty years and renames and clarifies two stages of development. Athens also addresses, for the first time, criticisms of his original theory. Milestones of this important work are discussed, as well as the paradoxes surrounding its present-day status in the field of criminology. Athens proposes a revised theoretical model that will be useful for classroom use, as well as for interested general readers and professionals.

DESCRIPTION: Athens, who is both a criminologist and sociologist, opens the volume with a restatement of his violentization thesis, which Richard Rhodes made famous in his highly claimed book, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. Contributors to this volume extend and test the theory of violentization in the contexts of child abuse, clinical psychology, corrections, soldiers in wartime, and the Holocaust. In this volume, Lonnie Athens' work on violence is applied, assessed, and extended by scholars from a wide variety of fields, including clinical psychology, criminology, history, psychiatry, and sociology. The contributions subject the theory of violentization to both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Finally, sociologists Jeffrey Ulmer, Jay Meehan, and David Maines situate Athens' work in criminology and sociology, providing crucial insights into its contribution to the theory and methods used in these two fields Contents: Preface (J.T. Ulmer); Violentization in larger context (L. Athens); Recipe for violence (M.P. Dumont); One man's story: how I became a "disorganized" dangerous violent criminal (L. Athens, R. Starr); The great cerebroscope controversy (R. Restak); Violent socialization and the SS-Einsatzgruppen (R. Rhodes); The short course for murder: how soldiers and criminals learn to kill (J. Sanborn); The violent socialization scale: development and initial validation (G. Rhodes et al.); From violent juvenile offenders to dangerous violent criminals: a test of Athens' theory (G.R. Jarjoura, R. Triplett); Afterword: where does violentization go from here? (J.T. Ulmer).

Lonnie Athens examines a problem that has long baffled experts and lay people alike: How does a person become a dangerous violent criminal? He explains how those who commit brutal crimes begin as relatively benign individuals who undergo lengthy, at times tortuous. development leading them to malevolence. The process that Athens labels "violentization" encompasses four stages: brutalization, belligerency, violent performance, and virulency. Athens uses vivid first-person accounts gleaned from in-depth interviews with nascent and hardened violent criminals to back up his theory, producing a book that will appeal to a wide variety of readers interested in criminal justice, law, and sociology.

Sociologist Norman K. Denzin characterized Lonnie Athens's earlier work as "the most far-reaching, provocative, and profound analysis of violent conduct" available in criminological literature. In Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited, Athens returns to his pioneering work and finds that his premises are just as relevant and original as in their earlier version--and that they have been curiously, and to society's detriment, overlooked. Rather than finding the causes of criminal behavior in external forces or personality disorders, as conventional wisdom often does, Athens renews his fundamental argument that a violent situation comes into being when defined by an individual as a situation that calls for violence--that an actor responds to the circumstance as he or she defines it. Based on the author's many firsthand interviews with offenders and on his personal experience, Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited augments Athens’s call to reexamine the source and locus of violent criminal behavior.