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Research Paper On Donald Gaskins

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Donald Gaskins: The Life of a Serial Killer
Donald Gaskins was a serial killer, arguably one of America’s most notorious. Although he had only been convicted of eight murders, he may well have killed over fifty men, women, and children. So why was he able to commit so many murders? We expect our criminal justice system to promptly apprehend criminals, and place them into a system where they will no longer commit crimes. So what went wrong? To what extent did society create or enable such behavior? To what extent was this person born this way, but even so, couldn’t something have been done, before the behavior resulted in so many victims? The questions are easy to ask and difficult, arguably impossible, to fully answer.
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He was born out of wedlock and never knew his biological father. He grew up in a small three-bedroom shack in Florence County, South Carolina. His mother rarely supervised him, and at the age of one, he drank a bottle of kerosene, causing him to have convulsions until the age of three. His mother married multiple men, and each of the men would randomly beat Gaskins, sometimes until he was unconscious. The brain damage he experienced as a child leads many forensic psychologists to believe it caused his deviant and abnormal behavior. Early onset brain injuries are linked to “severe behavioral deficits and aggressive tendencies,” which can lead to “acquired sociopathy” (Meadows, 2005, p. …show more content…

157). The guards allowed other inmates to gang rape him, and he performed sexual favors on the strongest inmate, protecting himself from violence. During this time, he learned about “human behavior and the criminal underworld” and knew that he never wanted to return (Rosewood, 2015, p. 12). He took what he learned from prison and applied it to his criminal activities throughout his life, and once he reached eighteen, the facility reluctantly released him, arguably a significant downfall to the juvenile detention system. His release report stated: “[he was] anti-social and there is something in his past development that is preyed upon his mind” and “we consider him dangerous and also believe that he has the homicidal tendencies peculiar to a paranoid type” (Rosewood, 2015, p.

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