Violence is increasingly the modern way of life--and death. If there's a formula for figuring out why, this is it.

Perched high on the wall behind Ned Megargee's desk is a stuffed wahoo, a memento of a long-ago Gulf fishing trip off Destin in the Florida Panhandle. Frozen forever in wire and lacquer, the fish's menacing grin reveals jaws lined with razor-like teeth, sharp enough to sever a man's hand.

For thrill-seeking anglers, the wahoo has few peers. No fish that swims is more emblematic of the violently aggressive power displayed by nature's finest predators.

Though he never intended it, Megargee may appreciate the symbolism that his mounted prize poses for his office. For 23 years, the office has belonged to a man with few peers in the study of aggression and violence in the most successful predator of them all--humans.

By all accounts--which include eager testimonials from the best in this peculiar business--Megargee (Ph.D. U. Cal-Berkeley) is a bonafide pioneer in the modern psychological investigation of violent and aggressive behavior. The body and scope of his work amounts to a grand scientific exegesis of what may very well be the most complex behavior seen in the human animal.

For Megargee, whose mild-mannered temperament would seem tailor-made for coolly appraising the passions that drive men and women to commit often horrific acts, human aggression is such a multi-dimensional phenomenon that it defies simple explanation. Over the years, this conviction has become more than a central thesis in Megargee's work--if he were Hindu, it would be his mantra.

"I try to bring out the complexity in these things, which makes my work harder to write about and communicate," he says. "But I feel strongly that oversimplifying the problem leads to simplified solutions which don't work."

When people ask him about ways to stop violence--as they seem never to tire of doing--Megargee is fond of quoting H.L. Mencken: "There's always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible and wrong."

Being as prominently tied to research in criminal psychology as he is, the line has come in handy often, particularly in the last two decades as the phenomenon of violence in American society has taken on a sinister character unlike anything the country has seen since the days of the wild frontier.

Widespread fear that America, and indeed much of the world, seems hopelessly locked in a spiraling paroxysm of violence makes anyone with credentials in criminal psychology and the study of aggression ready targets for people (read: politicians) desperately seeking cure-alls. But those who know anything about Megargee have long known that the FSU psychologist figures to be the last authority one would turn to in search of easy answers.

That may be one reason he's not popular in the witness box, as any number of academic psychologists seem proud to be these days. Megargee hasn't been asked to serve as an expert witness in a case involving criminal violence in years, although he literally wrote the book on the subject. More often than not, he says, the lawyers who want to hire him want him to testify that their clients haven't screwed up the case somehow.

"But the fact is, they often have," he said. "So, I tell them my testimony would propably help the other side more. And they say, 'thanks Doc,' we'll find someone else."

As a freshman at Amherst in 1954, Edwin (only those who don't know him use the name) I. Megargee was already well into plotting his career--as a writer. Writing was something the Plainfield, New Jersey native truly enjoyed, and something he figured he was good at. Early on he had found science to be pedantic and boring; in a word, lifeless--the very antithesis of what he wanted his prose to be.

During his sophomore year he seized an opportunity to hitch a ride with a group of anthropology students bound for a field trip to southern Mexico, near the town of Oaxaca. He was doing the classic writer-in-the-making thing--broadening himself, hunting for new and challenging things to write about. Only years later did he fully realize how powerfully being out of his own culture for just those few weeks changed his life.

The third-world millieu of mud huts and unrelieved poverty he faced in Oaxaca quickly put his studies on a different tack. His newfound curiosity in matters of culture led him into courses in anthropology, political science, religion and eventually, psychology. Before long, he found that he had acquired an intellectual appreciation for the utility of the scientific method, a system of nailing down reliable answers by collecting reliable data through experimentation.

Finding his anthropology courses a bit too fuzzy in this regard for his taste, Megargee gravitated to the study of psychology. There he would get the first hints that his interest in testing and measurement would set the stage for his career in psychological research. With a magna cum laude bachelor's degree from Amherst, he changed coasts, enrolling in Berkeley's graduate psychology program, famous for its strong emphasis on research in personality evaluation and assessment.

While pursuing his doctorate, Megargee became a clinical psychologist on the staff of a local county-run probation department. Working with juveniles, he discovered an interest in the nature of aggression and violence. Soon he was putting his aptitude for personality testing and evaluation to good use.

Unlike settings involving violent adult offenders, such as mental hospitals and the like, Megargee found that his testing work with juveniles had real meaning. The juvenile court relied heavily on his findings, something he found intensely gratifying.

"I had an arena to practice what I enjoyed doing most, and it was making a difference in these kids' lives," he recalls. "Even so, at the time it wasn't respectable for psychologists to be studying aggression or violence--that was something sociologists and psychiatrists did. Medical doctors didn't want psychologists doing diagnoses of any kind back then. And if they did, you handed them to a pyschiatrist, and your reports would be filed away somewhere and nothing would happen."

But the juvenile clinic where he worked was run entirely by staff psychologists, a collegial setting that allowed Megargee to test and evaluate to his heart's content, with the added benefit of knowing that his research would be taken seriously by judges when it came to his patients' days in court.

The dissertation Megargee eventually turned in to his major professor in the fall of 1963 thus had the look and feel of the genuine scholarly item. The work bore the stamp of a young scientist whose prodigious grasp of theory matched a rock-solid body of in-the-trenches data he'd collected and analyzed himself. The study might have been remarkable for this fact alone. But it was the report's conclusions which would soon catapult Megargee, at 26, into the forefront of national debate over the cause and control of human violence.

In three years of day-to-day work with juvenile offenders, Megargee had become convinced that the prevailing theories describing the causes of aggressive behavior in humans were far too simplistic. The most popular view held that all violent people were simply acting out, demonstrating personality defects resulting largely from a lack of inhibitions. Such a condition was entirely the result of poor upbringing, of a lack of socialization whereby the inhibiting effects of sound moral values, as might be espoused from pulpits, decent parents or schools, were demonstrably lacking.

Such personality types, bereft of adequate internal controls on their behavior, were thus classed as "undercontrolled," a category that when properly diagnosed could be used to fairly predict "dangerous behavior," as violence was then called.

In his paper, Megargee described some cases in which just the opposite was happening--young people from good homes, of apparently high moral character with no history of run-ins with the law, their parents or any other authority, yet nevertheless guilty of committing assorted acts of murder and mayhem.

"I was seeing people who were actually excessively controlled, with extensive inhibitions against committing any violent, certainly any criminally violent, act," Megargee says. "It appeared to me that we had an overly simplistic notion of what these people were about."

His subsequent theory of the overcontrolled violent offender thus flew in the face of conventional psychological approaches to understanding aggressive behavior. This finding, along with other observations he'd made, effectively signalled that the phenomenon of human aggression, and its most extreme form--violence--embraced a wide array of forces that not only defied easy explanation but defied simple identification as well. All personality testing that had been done up to then, in other words, was suspect, in Megargee's view. A new testing paradigm was called for, he maintained, which should not necessarily be constrained by the academic range of psychology.

Brash, across-the-grain thinking, to be sure--perhaps even a flash of brilliance. But for all that, the net impact of Megargee's paper might have remained perfunctory--a bound-and-shelved ticket for a career in research--had John F. Kennedy never made the stop in Dallas that same fall.

The Kennedy assassination had a sudden and profound impact on the national conscience. Practically overnight, politicians in Washington were calling for answers to how such a heinous act as killing a president, and a popular one at that, could happen in America. Was this the random act of a madman, or was the American psyche hellbound in a handbasket? An urgent call went out to find anyone doing research in the area of aggression and violence. With word spreading about his work, Megargee soon found himself squarely in the middle of a rarified academic atmosphere.

By 1964, Megargee--now an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin--was being quoted in the New York Times. The attention put him on a short list of invitees to a federal workshop sponsored by the Center for the Study of Anti-Social Behavior and Violence, a new part of the National Institute of Mental Health. In Washington for the first time in his life, Megargee found himself by far the youngest of the workshop's eight panelists, which included the nation's leading experts in the study of crime and aggression. The group had three days of intense discussions, tossed out recommendations for more research, and went home.

At Texas, Megargee soon found himself obliged to use rats as his research subjects, there being a lack of readily accessible humans to work with in institutional settings around Austin. By late 1967, he'd gotten a recruiting call from Charles Spielberger, a noted researcher in behavioral medicine, who ran the clinical training program in Florida State University's psychology department. Spielberger (since 1970 at the University of South Florida) badly wanted him in Tallahassee.

As it turned out, Megargee's last days in Austin could have been his last days, period. It was the beastly heat of Aug. 2, 1966 that made Megargee decide to walk to class the long way, favoring the shade of trees outlining a quadrangle where stood a soon-to-be-infamous landmark, the Texas Tower. Within seconds, Megargee heard the first shots fired by Charles Whitman, a deranged, heavily-armed man who had killed his wife and mother the night before. For 90 minutes Megar-gee was pinned down by Whitman's deadly aim, which killed 15 people and wounded 31 more that day. Whitman was finally shot dead by a policeman and an armed civilian.

Within months of his moving to Tallahassee, Megargee found himself once again in demand by federal policymakers. In the numbing wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Lyndon Johnson ordered the creation of a national commission to investigate the root causes of violence and to come up with answers. Megargee was asked to serve as co-director for the commission's largest component, a task force charged with examining the causes and prevention of individual acts of violence. But he declined, figuring it would require too much time away from campus. And he was right--the study some thought could be done in three months in fact took two years.

Still, the national exposure paid off handsomely for Megargee in his work at FSU. The National Institutes for Mental Health eagerly supported his research at FSU, which by 1969 had found its focal point right across town, at the Federal Correctional Institution, home to hundreds of felons. The prison's proximity to campus, a pleasant surprise to Megargee, was a springboard to an era of unprecedented research in the study of criminal aggression and violence.

For the next 17 years, Megargee was involved with FCI as both a researcher and a consultant. A seven-year evaluation program he began there in 1970 that produced what is arguably the most comprehensive body of knowledge ever derived from a study of criminal offenders. In his testing lab at the prison--the only one of its kind in the country--he and his students evaluated 1,345 consecutive admissions. One of his post-doctoral students, Dr. Joyce Carbonell, arrived from Bowling Green State University in 1977 to help Megargee undertake a long-term study of his subjects following their release. With the help of the FBI, the ex-cons were tracked by Megargee and Carbonell for up to a decade, producing one of the most detailed, longitudinal studies of violent, aggressive behavior ever undertaken.

An early product of the FCI research was the Megargee-Bohn (for Dr. Martin J. Bohn Jr., a collaborator) offender classification system, which quickly set a new standard for pyschological testing in correctional institutions. Introduced in 1977, the system was based on the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), traditionally one of the more widely used methods for classifying inmates in the federal penal system. Recently revised to incorporate changes in the original MMPI test--and to make it applicable to women offenders for the first time--Megargee's system remains, in Carbonell's words, "one of the more versatile, cost-effective and empirically validated management tools for classifying inmates" that is used not only in the U.S. but in foreign prisons as well.

The classification system represents the applied side of Megargee's research. But it's in his theories about the origins and causes of aggreesion, honed and tweaked over the years, that helps set Megargee apart from most other researchers, and qualifies him as a giant in the field, according to Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, professor of psychology at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University, who trained under Megargee as a post-doc at FSU in the 1970s.

"Ned's work may in fact have the same weight in Britain and Europe as it does here," Heilbrun told Research in Review. "Many more researchers today are interested in violence and violence prediction than was the case 15 years ago, and many correctional facilities are providing better rehabilitation for their inmates. Much of the credit for that can be attributed to Ned Megargee and his students."

By 1970, Megargee was using the expression "algebra of aggression" to describe his over-arching theory of the cause of aggressive behavior. The phrase not only fit a workable mathematic equation Megargee devised to describe the phenomenon, but served as a metaphor for appreciating the daunting complexity involved, particularly in violence. Heilbrun uses Megargee's theory in his practice and finds it to be the most efficient method available for analyzing the core of violent or aggressive behavior. "Like no other model I'm aware of, it sharpens our thinking about every aspect of this incredibly complicated phenomenon," he said.

The conceptual framework Megargee pieced together was an unabashed attempt to reconcile numerous theories that psychologists had put forth over the decades to explain aggression. In Megargee's mind, the collective wisdom on the subject of aggression somewhat resembled the fabled descriptions of an elephant given by blind men touching only parts of the beast. While some psychologists pointed to social disintegration and alcohol usage, others focused on early childhood experiences, especially sexual or other abuse. Some looked at the influence of aggressive role models in society and in the home, and, in particular, the extent to which young people are exposed to violent behavior as children. Still others thought of criminal violence as being largely a consequence of opportunity--a matter of easy targets or the availability of weapons.

Such ideas all fell within the purview of social psychology, so-named because of its emphasis in identifying social, or external factors--at the exclusion of internal factors belonging to the realms of physiology, biology and medicine--that influence human behavior. As Megargee well knew, modern psychological thought on human aggression had long been dominated by the dogma of social psychology, and it was a much broader perspective that he felt the evidence clearly warranted.

Megargee's problems with the theories of social psychologists were manifold: not only did these ideas tend to ignore almost all research and common-sense observations involving animals, but they paid scant attention to cultural differences among peoples as well. Moreover, the data on which these theories were based was derived almost solely from experiments dealing with simple and benign forms of aggression. Great importance tended to be placed on studies where students administered mild electric shocks to each other under lab-controlled conditions. Deemed equally important were observational studies, such as those made of children interacting on school playgrounds.

Whatever real aggression was manifest in such research was quite literally child's play compared to what Megargee was seeing routinely in his clinical evaluations of violent inmates. So obvious was the profound, "qualitative difference" between the patterns of aggression most researchers were studying in labs and playgrounds and what Megargee was seeing in prison that he was compelled, in his words, "to reformulate things."

Consequently, Megargee broke ranks with many of his peers in psychology to cast a bigger net than many were--and still are--willing to acknowledge is called for. In their 1970 book, The Dynamics of Aggression, he and Dr. Jack Hokanson (FSU psychologist now retired), examined the sweep of aggression and violence across social, cultural and political lines. The book showed how the "algebra of aggression" can be used to coalesce worthy ideas from such fields as endocrinology, neuroscience, pharmacology, psychiatry, anthropology, ethology and political science to help understand aggressive behavior ranging from simple assault to confrontations between nations.

"The idea is to pull together everything we know that may account for the phenomenon (of aggression) both psychologically and physiologically," he explains. "To be workable, this framework of ideas should make sense in terms of what we know about the brain, the endocrine system, and aggression not only in humans but animals as well."

In recent years, Megargee has found cause to add genetics to the list, a field still largely dismissed by many social psychologists as having little to do with violent behavior in humans. Mention the word "genes" in the same sentence as "aggression," "violence," or "crime" these days and prepare to duck--in the minds of many (Megargee being one) the association conjures twin specters of racism and eugenics, and thus is to be treated with utmost sensitivity. Put forth in 1908 by Francis Galton, an English scholar, eugenics is a discredited idea that mankind could benefit by weeding out genetically "inferior" persons through selective breeding and other methods. Holocaust scholars have noted that Adolf Hitler made extensive use of the theory in his campaign to "purify" the German population and rid Europe of Jews and other "undesirables."

Megargee is aware of recent developments in genetics which suggest that certain components of aggressive behavior in humans may be inherited (see page18). He comes down squarely in the middle of the debate, convinced that all behavior is a function of both heredity and environment. He said he supports the so-called Seville Statement on Violence, a creed signed by a group of scientists meeting in Seville, Spain in 1986, which holds that "war or any other violent behavior" isn't "genetically programmed into human nature." At the same time, he disagrees with those who maintain that all behavior is environmentally determined.

"People are not so far removed from other vertebrates that we can afford to ignore the vast literature on the (biological) factors that may influence their aggressive behavior," he said. "Researchers may choose to concentrate on one or the other, but it would be foolish to deny that both genetics and the environment play a part."

As a sign of the depressingly dangerous times, criminal violence commands such a high profile in today's society that the phenomenon sports its own taxonomy, much as an insect biologist might use to differentiate between types of maggots. Where once little distinction was made as to the methods or motives surrounding assault, armed robbery, rape or murder, nowadays it's hard for such acts to happen at all without having a label pinned on them.

Today, people violently bent on getting what they want participate in Drive-By Shootings; Turf Wars; Date Rapes; Thrill Killings; Schoolyard Killings; Workplace Killings; Copycat Killings; Crimes of Opportunity; Smash-and-Grabs; Gay-Bashing; Sex Crime; Hate Crime; Black-on-Black Crime; Skyjacking; Carjacking; Attacks on the Elderly; Tourist Stalkings; Gang Violence; Home Invasions; Random Acts of Violence and Domestic Violence--with options for Spouse Abuse, Child Abuse, Parent Abuse or Sibling Abuse. On a global scale, assorted brands of zealots may resort to Terrorism, with its latter-day flavors--Narco-, Eco-, Neo-Conservative, Right-Wing, Left-Wing, Political or Religious--or to Genocide, a common problem-solving modus operandi that has punctuated human history.

Such variegated malevolence, as carefully categorized by crime statisticians, suggests a multitude of reasons why people commit acts of criminal brutality. Megargee's school of thought holds that the underlying causes of even simple, everyday acts--such as a barroom knifing--can in some sense be as complicated as the motives behind an act of international terrorism. As fundamentally different as such acts may be, they are the result of a commonality of contributing factors that, when properly identified and analyzed, can be used to figure out not only why the perpetrators did what they did, but to predict whether they'll do it again if not stopped.

"If we stop the action and analyze a single response, we find that each act is the result of the interacton of many factors and dozens of unconscious choices," Megargee said. "We learn quickly that there is no such thing as a simple, single cause of criminal violence."

Megargee calls his "algebra of aggression" theory a "tool kit" for trying to sort out the factors that contibute to violent behavior. The first tool he reaches for is a package of potential motives, the sum of the forces that drive an individual to commit a violent act. Called instigation to aggression, this grab-bag of motives includes the usual things detective Columbo might look for--greed, jealousy, hate, anger, revenge--plus a number of underlying psychological factors, such as the need for status or acceptance within a gang, or a simple lust for control or excitement. But it also includes less obvious causes that may contribute just as powerfully as any of these.

Charles Whitman's autopsy, for example, revealed that the gunman was suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor. Stress from the headaches produced by the tumor easily could have played a role in his murder spree, Megargee said. But it doesn't take obvious physical impairments such as a brain tumor to motivate violent behavior--scientists have long identified a number of hormonal or neurological problems that can raise hob with a person's judgement and inhibitions, says Megargee. Extremely debilitating biochemical or nervous conditions can be the result of accidents, exposure to toxic substances or to imbalances in specific chemicals that control brain function.

Following a thorough search for motives, Megargee looks at the phenomenon of habit strength--the degree to which violence has become a habit for the offender. Does the individual have a long rap sheet? Done little or no time for misdeeds? Has violence actually paid off for the person or group? If so, such positive reinforcement provides a powerful incentive to follow a violent path. In fact, Megargee believes that habit strength is the one variable that most accurately predicts violent behavior--the stronger a person's history of violence, the more likely that person will resort to violence in the future.

Next, Megargee tackles what he views as the most complex component inherent in every illegal act--from jaywalking to serial killing--that being the phenomenon of inhibitions. To most psychologists, inhibitions largely are viewed as moral agents--learned from parents, religion, the community or society at large--that elicit feelings of guilt, shame or remorse. Research has shown that this internal moral barometer, also known as conscience, is only as good as the moral values reflected by the environment.

Megargee wholeheartedly agrees that how children are raised--the values they're exposed to by parents, peer groups or the media--can have an incalculable effect on their inhibitions against criminal behavior and violence. The "family values" crowd has it right when they argue that such things as a cohesive neighborhood, an intact family and religious instruction can contribute enormously to a child's sense of propriety.

"Chances are, if the environment you grow up in disapproves of violence, you're going to disapprove of it as an adult. If your neighborhood approves of violence, that's the attitude you tend to take with you as you grow up. There's little debate about that."

But even adults with strong senses of right and wrong can suffer lapses of moral inhibitions several ways, he said. One of the most effective means is by seeing others commit crimes with impunity. By seeing repeated examples of criminals going unpunished, with miscreants benefiting from their misdeeds, individuals of even the stoutest moral character are likely to experience an erosion of their inhibitions over time, Megargee said. As a case in point, immediately following the Simpson verdict last year, the leadership of the National Organization for Women publicly expressed fears that the trial's outcome would send a message that wife-beating was, in some cases, excusable.

Such examples suggest another potent way inhibitions or personal codes of ethics dissolve--through rationalization. This can be as simple as a person rationalizing shoplifting by saying the store overcharged them in the past. Or it can be on a scale of monumental horror. In his epic treatise on the Holocaust, Approaches to Auschwitz (John Knox, 1987), Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, former distinguished professor of religion at FSU (now president of the University of Bridgeport) and co-author John K. Roth document how Hitler succeeded in his "final solution," thanks in great part to his skill at dehumanizing Jews through massive propaganda. The men of the Reich who butchered six million Jews rationalized their actions as national defense against a conspiracy of sub-humans. Rubenstein shows how Hitler was borrowing a page from the history of the American West, when settlers rationalized their disenfranchisement and genocide of Indians who were in fact "non-Europeans."

But inhibitions also may evaporate or be severely diminished in ways that have nothing to do with a person's experiences, no matter how intrinsically good or bad they may be. Without a properly functioning brain, inhibitions either can't or won't be called into play no matter how entrenched they may be. Illnesses, accidents, and even a person's genetic make-up can dictate disruptions in brain chemistry that would otherwise keep impulsive, irrational and even dangerous behavior in check, says Megargee. And then, of course, there's always old John Barleycorn, a self-administered brain-disrupter that may be as potent in myth as it is in truth. Still by far the mood-changing drug of choice among violent offenders, alcohol anesthetizes the cortex, the part of the brain that controls behavior. Getting "whiskey-bent and hellbound" is more than a line from a country song--few psychologists deny that drinking--in the right setting--can be a sure-fire recipe for aggressive behavior.

"In looking closely at inhibitions against aggression, one thing stands out--it's a lot easier to lose your inhibitions than it is to foster them," Megargee said.

Violence is further mediated by a variety of situational factors, he explains. Time and place, together with the quality of the setting, factor heavily into an individual's behavior. Is it dark? Any cops around? What do the bystanders or gang members want me to do? Is it easy? Any guns available? Are we at war or on full-alert? Megargee says the latter question helps explain why the captain of the U.S.S. Vin-cennes gave the order to shoot down an incoming Iranian jetliner in July 1988. The situation was extremely tense, with the ship in a war zone and a sister ship having recently been crippled by an airborne missle. While more akin to a war tragedy than a crime, the example is analogous to that of the father who shoots his teenage daughter coming in late from a date, mistaking her for an intruder following a break-in the day before.

Almost every situational factor has a direct impact on inhibitions, Megargee said. The presence of guns, for example, can provoke a hothead to momentarily preempt inhibitions and blow someone's head off. In the hands of a convenience store clerk, a gun also can have a strong inhibitory effect on a would-be robber. Similarly, locked and bolted doors can inhibit crimes of impulse, research shows.

Finally, the last unknown variable in the "algebra of expression" is a construct Megargee labels reaction potential. This is a measure of the net potential an individual has for reacting violently after all motives, inhibitions, habits and situational factors have been considered, either consciously or, as is often the case, unconsciously. In clinical settings, here's where evaluators finally get their best chance to assess an individual's potential for future violence--information that parole boards and judges live and die by--and it's tricky business of the first order.

If the factors that incite a person to violence outweigh the sum of all inhibitory factors, then violence is possible, but far from automatic, says Megargee. The reason is because as the brain processes all the data, it weighs the consequences and probability of success of any number of possible responses. Some responses may be extremely violent, some only mildly violent, others not violent at all. At the last stage, the brain orders an action that offers the greatest capacity to satisfy the most needs at the least cost. All this mental ciphering may take weeks--if the object is to assassinate a political leader--or a millisecond in the heat of a drug deal gone bad.

Megargee freely admits that his theory is much more useful at explaining violent behavior after it's happened than at predicting it. He says the same could be said about every aggression test or theory ever devised, from the famous Rorschach (inkblot) test of the 1930s on down.

"There's no test that, by itself, can adequately differentiate between aggressive and non-aggressive people. Aggression is simply too complex a phenomenon to be assessed adequately by a single test or theory."

Still, Megargee likes to think that his "algebra of aggression" framework has helped reduce the guesswork in predicting violent behavior, something which he feels prison psychologists have gotten much better at in recent years. Prisons have an inordinant interest in the accuracy of such assessments, not only because of the bad press and public risk associated with putting a dangerous inmate on the street, but also because--at an average cost of around $25,000 per year to keep someone locked up--incarceration is a budget-killing business.

So just how good is state-of-the-art violence prediction today? Megargee pegs its success rate at around three in 10--for every 10 people identified as potential threats to society, about three wind up actually being so. "Then the question is, which three? At that point it becomes a policy decision whether you lock up all 10 to prevent violence from the three."

For a psychologist whose lifelong academic interest has been grounded in the study of human aggression and violence, American society has provided one hell of a research lab for Ned Megargee during the past 30 years, in more ways than one. His entire, post-graduate career literally coincides with a vaulting crime rate for which there may be no precedent in the modern history of any industrialized nation on Earth.

Although the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that the rate of violent crime has declined somewhat since 1989 (ostensibly because the Baby Boom generation is now past its crime-happy prime), it would be the rare American who would claim to have seen any relief at all from the criminally inclined. Whatever the trend may be, the raw numbers still horrify: For 1994 (the newest stats available), the BJS reports that there were 23,305 official murders nationally; 102,000 rapes; 619,000 robberies; better than 1.1 million aggravated assaults; and more than 102,000 cases of arson.

Some of these official figures may in fact be low and outside of the true mark, as suggested by other studies that show, for example, that aggravated assaults may be up to six times higher than the numbers reported to law enforcement. If the higher estimates are true, they would translate into a truly scary statistic--the average American today is living with an 80 percent chance of being a victim of a violent crime in his or her lifetime.

With an annual homicide rate running nearly 10 times higher than any other western nation, the U.S. might seem to have the corner on violence. Indeed, according to a recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), given current trends murder is likely to overtake traffic accidents to become the leading cause of death by injury in the U.S. by the year 2003.

But from a global perspective, it's abundantly clear that violence is hardly a solely owned American franchise. Compared to the carnage capitals of Rwanda and Sri Lanka, not to mention Belfast, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East and a host of lesser-known hell-holes, life in the U.S. is a Sunday stroll through a theme park.

Like charity, however, paranoia begins at home. Buoyed by the news media's "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality, a persistent, popular perception among Americans--as every political strategist knows well--is that the country is in a freefall of violent civil and social turmoil. To be sure, developments since 1960 would seem to offer scant argument otherwise (see chart, page 17).

Looking back on his career, Megargee admits that today's ghastly level of lethal and destructive crime comes as an "unpleasant surprise." Even with the high-profile murders and violent civil unrest of the late Sixties, he said that 30 years ago he never would have forecast the degree to which wanton violence has become an indisputable part of the American landscape.

"Gosh no, nothing like this," he said. "I wouldn't have foreseen the extent to which guns and drive-by shootings and drugs have proliferated. Back then I never would have predicted such things, especially the proliferation of prisons."

Growth in American prisons, up a whopping 250 percent since 1980, is one very expensive measure of the nation's 30-year crime wave. Today, about 1.5 million Americans are behind state, federal and local jailhouse bars, a prison population that represents by far the largest percentage of incarcerated citizenry of any country on earth. Megargee and Carbonell are now studying a remarkable change in U.S. prisons--the arrival of women. According to the BJS, in recent years the rate of increase among women prisoners has surpassed that of men.

When Megargee was in college, sociologists worried alot about teenage gangs fighting with switchblades. Today's gangs may square off with MAC-10 machine guns, TEC-9s, Uzis or Glock 9mm semi-automatics, weaponry more sophisticated than anything carried by the average dogface in World War II.

Megargee won his doctoral stripes and much of his claim to fame by writing about the overcontrolled assaultive-type, a person whose built-in inhibitions against criminal violence eventually are overcome by mounting frustration and anger, resulting in extreme, usually homicidal, violence. Today, he sees that personality type becoming something of a psychological dinosaur, as the violent agenda consumes ever-larger numbers of young people whose cultural or moral inhibitions against violence simply don't exist. As a recent study suggests, in many urban settings today, when kids get into arguments, "duking it out" is simply no longer a practical option--they've learned that their only choice is reaching for their guns.

That violence breeds violence is hardly a new concept among sociologists or psychologists who study crime. But the peculiar virulence that marks American lawlessness today leads some psychologists to suggest that this axiom is at work on a scale of frightening dimensions.

Applying his "algebra of aggression" framework to American society, Megargee sees uncontrolled growth in habit strength in inner-city ghettoes, where racism, unrelieved poverty, missing parents, drug addiction and hopelessness fuel what he and others call a "subculture of violence." Nothing prepares young people for violent careers more effectively than growing up in an environment where violence is an everyday part of life--and typically, death, he says. No one knows this fact better than African-Americans, whose largest communities are quite literally in the death grip of violence. Consider these stats, drawn from reports by federal agencies:

• In Los Angeles County, gang-related deaths of black males, aged 15 to 19, increased from an average of 60.5 per 100,000 population per year from 1979 to 1981 to an average of 192.4 per 100,000 from 1989 to 1991.
• Also in Los Angeles, of the 7,288 gang murders which occurred between 1979 and 1994, 93 percent were black youths between the ages of 15 and 34. Almost a quarter of these were killed in drive-by shootings.
• Between the ages of 15 and 24, homicide is now the number one cause of death among black males and females nationwide, and is the fourth leading cause of death for blacks of all ages.

What is particularly unnerving about such subculture violence is that it has found ways to graft itself onto other cultures, both here and abroad. Last October, a JAMA article on gang violence in Los Angeles described how this phenomenon works: "The street gang subculture has produced a style of dress, verbal and nonverbal communication, music, camaraderie, and funeral rituals that has made it possible for youth of any ethnic group or background to identify with this lifestyle." An NBC reporter noted this spring that popular rap musicians--mimicked the world over--flaunt their often violent brushes with the law as "badges of honor."

Megargee has written extensively about the cycle of self-perpetuating violence found in urban settings, and has noted its profound impact on the young via what is classically termed "operant learning," in which behavior is learned through steady, positive reinforcement. But as the JAMA article suggests, one need not be brought up in what one writer calls "America's crime factories" to soak up their values, he says. Perhaps all you need to do is watch TV.

"Televised dramatizations of violent behavior can alter attitudes toward violence, making it more acceptable as a solution to interpersonal problems," Megargee wrote in Criminal Violence (Sage, 1982). His conviction, based on research done in the 1970s by one of his former students, Dr. Elizabeth Menzies, and confirmed by many researchers since, is now shared officially by the federal government (see page 21).

If larger themes are at work beneath the daily headlines of horror, what might these be? Megargee's theory only hints at more fundamental causative agents that of late have become major suspects in a growing debate over the fate of world social and political order.

Technology's impact on the 20th Century, of course, is the stuff of entire libraries. Aside from giving us ingenious new ways to destroy ourselves en masse--something our forebears no doubt would have killed for--technology has shrunk the world through mass communication. This has had the effect of magnifying violent acts no matter their real importance, and consequently making all of us feel more threatened, says Megargee.

"When Lincoln was shot, it took three months for the news to reach San Francisco. The tragedy in Scotland (16 schoolchildren shot dead, along with their teacher, in March) reached us almost instantly, and people here in Tallahassee were frightened."

Aside from weaponry, mass communication and TV, another chilling effect of technology is its impact on jobs, he said. In the Brave New Cyber-World, the march of machines continues at an ever-faster pace, measured all too well by growing numbers of displaced workers. It's the irony of the age that with the means of doing a lot more work with fewer hands, there's more work to be done than ever yet far too many hands needed to do it. In The Age of Triage (Beacon Press, 1983) and similar writings, Richard Rubenstein warns of the dire consequences of a world teeming with populations deemed "surplus."

Megargee views the prospects of overpopulation as even more worrisome than technology's contribution to world joblessness. In a 1985 study of the psychological effects of overcrowding in prison--the first of its kind ever done, in fact--Megargee found a direct correlation between aggressive behavior and population density. Any number of animal studies have shown the same thing. Writ large, such findings bode ill for the future, a fact not lost on population researchers--the world's population is growing at a clip of 93 million a year.

"With the increase in population, there's more competition for resources, and there's more contact with other people, so there are more chances for irritation. That's a very good way to instigate aggression," Megargee said.

His success as a social seer in the Sixties being what it was, Megargee is reluctant to make any long-range predictions about the role of violence in the society of tomorrow. "History is full of cycles of religion and morality, war and peace. Things change."

But not all things, he knows.

"You just can't undo technology. Once something is invented, it's going to stay around for the most part. We're staying alive a lot longer today through medical technology, although there's a real societal cost that goes along with that. But who's going to put modern medicine back in the box?

"So, I think a lot of what we're seeing now with aggression and violence is a direct result of these trends in population and technology. Many young people apparently feel that they're carrying the weight of it all on their shoulders, and they see little reason to be optimistic about the future. And that can have a killing effect on inhibitions."