Non-Humanness: The Extent of Dehumanization and Level of Empathy among Male Prisoners

with History of Violence

How They See Our Own: “ “

We grew up in world where morals shape our behaviors and beliefs. These morals, make it
difficult for us to commit violence. However, there are some individuals, who think that it is easy
for them to commit acts of violence towards other people. There are different justifications why
people commit to violence, one way is through dehumanization. Dehumanization refers to the
act of perceiving victimized subgroups as not completely human. Psychologists distinguish
between two types of non-humanness: one that denies uniquely human attributes to others by
comparing them to animals and one that denies human nature to others by comparing them to
objects (also known as objectification and commonly applied, at least in our society, to
women)(Nick Haslam, 2006) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_4
Dehumanization influences a person in violent behavior and not show any empathy to the victim.
Perpetrators that dehumanize their victims think of them as subhuman(Marsella 2007).

Closely followed by humanization, or its antithesis, dehumanization, is the concept of empathy

itself. More often than not, people hold a preconception that criminals or prisoners lack empathy
which explains their tendency to hurt or take advantage of others. Violence and brutality would
be committed at the spur of the moment or through continuous circumstances without regard
for the humanity of their victims and without the act of empathizing with them. What we aim to
see now is the possibility of change among these prisoners. After their incarceration, we begin to
determine how their way of thinking transformed. Did they begin to re-humanize people by
changing the way they perceived their past victims? After reflecting during their imprisonment,
did they begin to empathize with the people around them and the ones they encountered in the
past? Do they still see others as less than human or do they recognize how they also belong to
our own?