The Bowser Conundrum

In 1975, 16 year old Edgar J. Bowser III shot and killed Officer James Lonchiadis in Shrewsbury. According to this story in today's paper, he's been granted parole today.

Maybe the conundrum here is how to answer the question, "Can people really change?"

I believe they can. I believe that if you take a non-criminal person at an early enough age and place them for many years in a closed environment with a population comprised exclusively of criminals, it will be very apt to change them into a criminal. I tend to look at that aspect of the prison system as a school for criminals.

Ostensibly, however, the prison system is a system of reform. I have no idea how this system of reform might be expected to work, but this is what they say is going on. I can assume that, possibly, there might be something to be said for ramming strict routine and conformity down prisoners' throats on a minute by minute basis, year after year. It's the conform, or else methodology that's used in a much less obvious manner in public schools and organized sports. The product of this system is expected to be a person who has deeply instilled values based upon blind obedience to authority.

Maybe this works... I really don't know.

Meanwhile, much of the prevailing medications prescribed for children with behavioral problems is based on the idea that they have a chemical imbalance of some sort. No lab tests, of course, exist for revealing these so-called chemical imbalances, but billions of tons of various psych drugs are being fed to an awful lot of kids these days, based on this contention that they have a chemical imbalance.

Did the 16 year old cop killer have a chemical imbalance? If he did, has that chemical imbalance now, after over three decades of reform, magically straightened out without any medications? Since nobody has any slightest clue how to test for this, we'll most definitely never know. But the system has deemed this guy reformed because, apparently, he's smart enough to have figured out how to play the game within the prison system.

The difficult fact is that nobody will ever know if Edgar J. Bowser III has been successfully reformed by the state until the man has lived in society for his entire life without incident. In other words, until he's lived out his life and then passed away, no truly certain conclusions can ever be drawn.

The real conundrum is how non-criminal behavior in children can't be expected to change without a lifetime prescription, but a murderer can be believed to have changed completely, merely by environment...