For the last seven years, I’ve produced about a dozen true crime documentaries and documentary series. My role touches on all aspects of production: researching and vetting cases, interviewing subjects (both over the phone and in-person), and weaving together that interview footage into a cogent narrative. My documentaries have aired on many major television networks, like Discovery Channel, VICE, A&E, and National Geographic.

As a field producer, I travel to prisons around the country, sit down with these inmates, and ask pointed questions about their crimes—what they did, why they did it, and how they felt about it after. The probing, uncomfortable questions you wouldn’t dare ask in polite society. But working in media gets you a hall pass.

Sometimes my prison conversations are recorded on-camera and integrated into a show. Other times, I’ll just come in during visitation hours for more casual conversation and to vet their stories. The stories I hear run the gamut from tearful confessions to elaborate equivocations. Yet whether truthful or not, these are stories that few people ever get to hear.

As a result, I’ve put together a list of insights and observations I’ve taken away from these prison visits, to show how my preconceptions and assumptions about criminals and the justice system changed over the course of my visits.

**1. Nobody snaps**

Many of stories featured on the shows I create involve ordinary, fully-functional people who suddenly snap and become heinous murderers.

Yet most of us who produce these shows know that trigger-and-snap narrative doesn’t really pan out in real life. It just happens to be the most interesting version of the story. It’s the version most likely to keep audiences on the edge of their seat and leave them with the uneasy fear that even those closest to them could—at any moment—snap and become a homicidal maniac. It only takes the wrong trigger. But it’s never quite like that.

When I meet with people who have committed murder and start to peel away the layers of their lives, it’s clear that there are a multitude of causes, often dating back to childhood: trauma, sexual abuse, extreme poverty, neglect, drug abuse, mental illness, etc. Turns out the “perfect housewife” who, out-of-nowhere, “suddenly snapped” was actually abused growing up and had a long track record of using violence to solve her problems. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You get the idea.

In fact, by the time someone’s in a mental state where they could take another human’s life… it’s usually already too late. The key to preventing crimes is not identifying the trigger, but rather looking for unhealthy patterns of behavior that seem to escalate with time (e.g. poor decision making, drugs, violence etc). While intervention is possible early on, it becomes more and more difficult as time goes on and the unhealthy behavior begins to mount. Our media—not to mention the justice system itself—is so focused on identifying a single cause, we fail to see the slow development of potential murderers until it’s already too late.

**2. Everyone is innocent… of something**

Nearly every inmate I’ve talked to over the years feels that the justice system has done them wrong, and that they don’t deserve the sentence they received. Now it’s true the justice system is deeply flawed—sometimes even downright corrupt—but usually they are not speaking to broader policy or criminal just issues. Rather, they take the stance that if there’s even one small error in the case, then they are innocent of everything and should be released. As an example, I once corresponded with an inmate who’d stabbed someone to death in a robbery-gone-wrong. He’d cornered someone in a dark alley. When his victim attempted to fight back, he panicked and stabbed the man five times in the chest and ran away.  He swore to the ends of the earth that he’d stabbed his victim exactly five times. However, when police arrived several hours later, they found the man dead with eight stab wounds. Eight. How was this possible? According to this inmate, after he stabbed his victim, someone else must have come along, saw him on the ground and stabbed him an additional three times. That was the only explanation. It was that other guy who was the murderer, not him. He should have been charged with assault and released. The problem with this logic is that—even IF his far-fetched explanation was correct and someone else did come along and stab a dying man three more times in the chest—the fact remains that any one of first five stab wounds may have been the fatal blow. The point being that it’s very common, in the aftermath of the case, for details to take center stage. A small error in the prosecution brings on a feeling of indignance and injustice, even if it effectively makes no different in the sentence.

**3. Not everyone who kills is a psychopath or a sociopath**

This is another area where the media has misled us. The words ‘psychopath’ and ‘sociopath’ are applied far too often in crime reporting to create a heightened sense of drama and danger, and again, to make us feel scared. The media would have you believe that everyone who kills is a cold-blooded, emotionless monster. Yet, according to one study, only 1% of the general population are psychopaths and 16% of the prison population.  That’s not a whole lot when you consider how often these words come up in my conversations with victims, family members, and law enforcement (at least once with each case).

One of the defining characteristics of psychopathy and sociopathy is a lack of empathy or ability to conceptualize someone else’s pain. As empathetic humans, we have a hard time imagining how someone who is capable of empathy can take another life. And yet, it happens all the time. As humans, we have an amazing ability to turn ‘off’ the empathy switch when it comes to our enemies. I don’t even need to go into how entire countries full of ‘normal’ people were able to do this, as recently at the 1940’s. Put a normal empath in a situation where they feel threatened enough, and eventually survival trumps emotions. Yet, down the line, once the threat is removed, empathy often kicks in. The remorse is acute. And it is genuine.

Over the years, I’ve only interviewed one person I felt certain was a sociopath. The guy was serving two life sentences for a randomly killing two people at a car rental center while attempting to rob the place. This particular inmate came across as bright, mild-mannered, friendly, and affable. Charismatic, yes, but in a more subdued you-couldn’t-help-but-like-him kind of way. ‘Unflappable’ would be a good word to describe him. What tipped me off that he may have been a sociopath was the reasoning behind the killings, and the way in which he described them. Every person he shot (the rental car employees and later, his girlfriend) occurred because the person hindered him from doing something he set out to do. When asked why he committed the crimes, he explained, without any hint of guile or irony, that they were simply ‘in the way.’ Sure, he cared about his girlfriend, but at that point, “she had become more of a liability” on his run from the law. Were someone to watch the interview with the sound off, attempting to gauge the content by his countenance, you’d think he was talking about something totally mundane, like having tea with his grandmother. No hint of distress or attempt to feign distress or even awareness that there should be distress there. In fact, he seamlessly went back-and-forth between describing his crimes and the other, more ordinary, aspects of life on the run… like ordering a pizza… with no change whatsoever to his emotional valence.

**4. The average IQ of a criminal is lower than you think**

If you believe the media, you might think prison is filled with conniving, clever sociopaths. In fact, the average IQ of adult offenders is 85, significantly below average. That alone should lend some insight into why people commit crimes. It’s not because they’re evil geniuses. Rather, it’s due to poor impulse control, lack of foresight, and inability to thoughtfully come up with alternative solutions to their problems.

**5. Lying can be deceiving**

I’ve gotten really good at knowing when someone is lying to me and it happens—a lot. There are many giveaways: they get shifty, defensive, they suddenly become very adamant, they lose eye-contact (or maintain too much eye-contact). In any event, after a while you just know. However, what I’ve also come to realize is that usually people don’t lie about the things you expect them to lie about… and just because someone’s being dishonest doesn’t mean you can explain why. You’d think, for example, that most people would lie to appear more innocent. That’s not always the case, though. Often, they lie to cover up some embarrassing detail—like the fact that the “friend” they visited was actually their former drug dealer (but they don’t want me to know they were a user). Other times, it’s to cover up someone else’s involvement in the story, like a girlfriend or perhaps another gang member that they fear will track them down at some point in the future. More often than not, however, I have no idea why they are lying. I can ask more questions to try to tease out the truth. What I cannot do is automatically assume that a lie equals guilt.