All God'S Children by Fox Butterfield

...Whether the child's immediate environment is disordered or decent will work its way on these predispositions...

...Clearly, then, we are dealing with certain predispositions...

...The current street code arises out of broken relations and further severs all ties...

...Alas, this seems true...

...If we go too far in the direction of understanding without judgment, we begin to excuse and wind up in exculpatory strategies that can never hold any single person responsible for much of anything...

...This is not the way nice people are supposed to talk...

...This is a terrible story, terrible for reasons Butterfield details and for reasons he does not...

...What could that tradition be...

...How, then, are we to account for the many violent children whose ancestry does not flow from the Southern code of "honor...

...The perceived insult to a lady's virtue or a man's honor, for example, suggested that the offended woman or man's word was not to be trusted...

...By the age of fifteen, Willie claimed he had committed two thousand crimes, including two hundred armed robberies and twenty-five stabbings...

...Why are we caught up so short when we come across individuals who really are destructive, who approach others as a predator does prey, who are missing something in their moral make-up that would enable them to recognize the humanity of others...

...As a minor (the law was subsequently changed), he was sentenced to five years in a training facility...

...I don't feel nothing...

...To make a giant segue, without compelling historic evidence of direct continuity, from the "proud culture that flourished in the antebellum rural South" to the horrors of kids killing kids, is asking the reader to make an unjustified leap of faith...

...Released when he turned twenty-one, Willie was soon back in prison where he will likely remain, largely in solitary confinement...

...In a book that evokes pity and terror, Fox Butterfield succeeds wonderfully well-despite his occasional flat prose- in detailing the history of the Bosket family's tradition of violence...

...But we put everyone at risk if we don't recognize that there really are violent people in the world-that is their identity-and we cannot cure them...

...Butterfield's book, whatever its intent, suggests that we can, at best, incarcerate him in order to spare others from his depredations...

...More tough-mindedly, it makes sense to look at relatively recent historic developments that undermine any authentic community: the domestic arms race, the corrosion of whole neighborhoods by drugs, especially crack cocaine (a relatively recent development), loss of decent jobs for unskilled workers, forms of urban renewal, and, most importantly, the breakdown of the inner-city black family...

...Who is being protected...

...It is a story of something gone truly haywire, a story of violent impulse...

...But the nice folks in this story at times seem extraordinarily out of touch, unwilling to really come to grips with and to fathom the depth of young Bosket's destruc-tiveness...

...Even if one accepts Butterfield's account of "Bloody Edgefield," South Carolina, where distant Bosket ancestors trace their origins (and I have no reason to doubt it although he does layer hyper-bole on hyperbole), there are problems in attributing direct causality...

...He assaulted his social workers with scissors or metal chairs, set other inmates on fire, or escaped by driving off in state vehicles...

...Bosket came up through the juvenile system at a time when major reforms in New York were underway (under Peter Edelman) that had, as their aim, keeping kids in communities-community, notes Butterfield, got repeated over and over "like a mantra from the late sixties...

...This was the pattern with Butch [Willie's father] and Willie...

...He possesses an IQ at the genius level as well as a convict father who also murdered and with whom he never had a relationship until Willie began a correspondence from his own prison cell...

...However misguidedly, "honor" was about protecting something...

...Butterfield seems to half-believe this...

...The best we can do, under the Augustinian dictum to do no harm, is to try to protect others from them and to treat them, within a situation of confinement and control, with as much decency and respect as possible...

...Consequently, Willie's upbringing was no upbringing at all but a kind of minimally contained unleashing of a hostile kid into the world...

...There may be a case to be made along these lines, but Butterfield hasn't made it...

...Recognizing that reality would take us a lot further toward understanding Willie Bosket than does the etiquette of eighteenth-century duels...

...Astonishingly, from time to time there were those who seem actually to have been gulled and who proclaimed Bosket "rehabilitated," with the head of one facility declaring to a PBS documentary team that Willie was a "great model of our rehabilitative efforts...

...These are questions one wishes Butterfield had taken up, but he does not...

...It is, of course, Willie's own plaint...

...In the spring of his fifteenth season, Willie shot and killed two men on the subway in Manhattan...

...In fact, it diminishes the accomplishments of the tens of thousand of men, women, and children who live in poverty and tough conditions who do not become Willie Boskets, who do not stab, assault, and kill...

...There is no doubt-none whatsoever-that children, especially young men, from homes without fathers, are more at risk for every possible harm, both as sufferers and perpetrators...

...Moving from the particulars of the Boskets to generalities about America, the argument grows strained, the analogies fall apart, the book seems awkwardly cobbled together...

...That the eighteenth-century South Carolina back country might have been unusually contentious and violent is certainly plausible...

...Jean Bcthhc Elshtain Willie Bosket, the protagonist of this disturbing book, is reputed to be the most dan-gerous man currently being held in the New York State prison system...

...shot people, that's all," he said...

...A violent boy who turned into a even more violent young man and who is in prison for life...

...Remarkably, Butterfield locates it in the "dictates of honor...beloved of antebellum white South Carolinians," a code he claims has now been "transmuted into the strictures of the street...

...Butterfield makes it clear that Willie honored no close ties to anyone who crossed him, or seemed to cross him...

...But ten-year-olds didn't roam around killing other ten-year-olds or stabbing sleeping men...

...For one thing, the duels and battles fought by hot-blooded South Carolinians were between adult men, with each party to the dispute armed and following a ritualized code...

...But who or what is this "system...

...They were impulsive, aggressive, irritable children who would not obey their parents, bullied their neighbors, and acted out when they got to school ....After age seven or eight, their cases seem intractable...

...What's a society to do with a violent young man who kills people, that's all...

...There may well be an "American tradition of violence," but it isn't compellingly presented in All God's Children...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain is the author of Democracy on Trial (Basic Books...

...By the time Butterfield gets to the real meat of his story, the "American tradition" is pretty much left behind and the reader is drawn ever deeper into a truly awful tale of family ruin...

...Willie's mother, despite Butter-field's attempts to suggest she was doing her best under difficult circumstances, seems clearly disturbed and drawn to relationships with violent men...

...When he was fifteen years old, Willie was convicted of a double murder...

...The final chapter is titled "Willie: A Monster Created by the System...

...Who is Willie Bosket...

...The Boy No One Could Help," is the title of one of Butterfield's chapters...

...First sent to reform school at age nine after he tried to kill a pregnant teacher by throwing a typewriter out of a school window at her, no reformatory or mental institution could hold him for long...

...This old code of honor, unlike current notions of respect or "dissing," was bound up with relationships that held a thick social web intact...

...The upshot was to shunt Bosket around and send him back to a "community" (which was no community at all) where he stabbed, robbed, and assaulted again and again...

...A canny social worker of the old school who argued against permissive treatment was reprimanded and labeled a "troublemaker...

...Why does a liberal society have such difficulty coming to grips with the reality of human evil...

...The story of the Boskets is not primarily a story of poverty...

...This imperfect fit of one story into a Very Big Story occupies much of the first part...

...Butterfield tiptoes up to this question when he notes, in his "Epilogue," that the overwhelming majority of adults who commit violent crimes, started very young...

...As I indicated above, Butterfield fails in his attempt to link the Boskets to an "American tradition of violence...

...But one doesn't release them into the world...

...He does much less well with what he tendentiously calls the "American tradition of violence...