Mindhunter Review: What This Movie Series Taught Me About Criminal Minds As a Criminology Student

Greetings Steemit family! 👋
Before we start let me ask some questions question.
Do you think we have to think like a monster (criminals) before we can be able to understand their behaviours?
How do become what they ?
Do you think you have criminal tendencies?
These questions kept me up after watching Mindhunter. And I still don't have a complete answer.

If you want to get stuck thinking about why criminals are criminals, what made them that way, what shaped them, what broke them, go and watch Mindhunter. Right now.
This TV series is all about an FBI agent Holden Ford who becomes obsessed with understanding the minds of serial killers in an early time if his career . He doesn't just want to catch criminals. He wants to understand them that's why He sits across from the most dangerous men in America and asks them questions that nobody else dared to ask.
And the answers change him.

As a Criminology and Security Studies student at the University of Delta, Agbor, this show felt less like entertainment and more like a visual textbook.
For a long time many law enforcement agencies believed criminals were simply born that way, simply bad seed, evil by nature and are meant to be rooted out of the society and lock them up and move on.
But Mindhunter challenges that completely.
What the show reveals, and what my understanding and studies of criminalities comfrim, is that criminality is rarely about nature alone. It is about everything that happens to a person before they ever commit a crime.
An absent father. A neglectful mother. An environment that normalized violence. A childhood full of shame, rejection and powerlessness.
Real violent offenders, the kind Holden Ford interviews in the show, often share one thing in common. From a very young age they had violent fantasies. Not because they were born monsters. But because something in their environment planted those seeds early and nobody noticed or intervened.
That is the real horror of Mindhunter. Not the killers. But the systems that produced them.

Here is where it gets personal for me.
Holden Ford fascinated me but also unsettled me. The more he understood the criminals he interviewed the more he started to think like them. You could see it happening slowly. His language was changing. His relationships were suffering. Even his colleagues were beginning to look at him differently.
And I found myself thinking. Do you have to become a little bit of a monster to truly understand monsters?
Then I turned that question on myself.
Do I have criminal psychology in me?
I think what Mindhunter was showing me is that Holden Ford had criminal tendencies. Not because he was evil, but because deep understanding of darkness requires you to go to dark places mentally. The line between profiler and predator is thinner than we want to admit.
That thought stayed with me long after the final episode.

I have to be honest about something strange.
Ed Kemper is one of the most disturbing real life killers featured in the show. And I liked him. I couldn't explain why at first.
Now I think I understand. What I was responding to was his intelligence, his self awareness and his articulateness. He could explain himself in ways most people cannot. That is deeply unsettling because it forces you to separate the person from the crime and that is uncomfortable.
That discomfort is called morbid fascination. It is a well documented psychological response where we are drawn to understanding darkness even when it disturbs us. Mindhunter makes every viewer experience it whether they admit it or not.

Before Mindhunter I looked at criminals the way most people do. With judgment and distance.
Now when I see a criminal in Nigerian news my instinct is different. I find myself asking where did they grow up. What did their family look like. What happened to them at age seven, ten, fifteen.
That shift in thinking is what criminology is supposed to do. And Mindhunter did it better than some of my textbooks.

Pls watch Mindhunter if you are curious about human psychology, law enforcement, or simply why people become what they are or exhibit some certain traits
But be warned 😅, It will make you question things, about criminals,about society. about yourself.
And maybe that is exactly the point. 😂😂
Have you watched Mindhunter? Did it change how you think about criminals? Tell me about all your thoughts and opinion in the comment section.