The Hitman Joey Black: Over Controlled Hostility Theory

Review of history of Joey Black:

The Hitman Joey Black came from a broken family and childhood. His parents were not good role models, as his father was also part of the Mafia, and his mother couldn’t make ends meet alone. To help his family, he began running numbers for a local business. To defend against enemies of himself and his business, he would get violent, his first murder being at the young age of sixteen (“Black” & Fisher, 2002). From there, and through business connections and willingness to violence, Joey Black became one of the most sought out hitmen in history, where to this day his identity is a secret. His known murder total isthirty-eight people.

There are many correlates of crime and behavior that could explain his reasons

for committing crime, such as his broken household, his parents being absent as he was raised, or that he grew up in a low socioeconomic household (“Black” & Fisher, 2002). He was beaten quite often as a child, as he bounced from each foster home. Beyond finding simple correlates of crime, it is possible to link traditional and evolutionary psychological theories of crime into Joey Black’s life, to further explain his criminal behavior.
Traditional Theory of Crime:
A traditional theory of crime that may explain Joey Black’s criminal tendencies and behaviors is the Over Controlled Hostility theory.

This theory explains that stress and pressure that builds up in an individual’s life can amount to an explosion of violence (Camilleri, 2017). This is because people who over-control their emotional response do not give themselves time to think and to properly manage their emotions (Megargee, 1966). Physical aggression includes not having control over one’s self. It is from this that people who suffer from over controlled hostility were most likely never taught how to control or overcome such inhibitions (Megargee,

1966).
Joey Black’s criminal tendencies are explained realistically with this theory. From the novel, The Hitman, written directly by Joey Black, he explains that he really had no down time as a child. From the young age of eleven he was committing crimes for money and food for his family (“Black” & Fisher, 2002). Black had no time as a child to be a child, he was always foraging, and never had a concrete home. This can lead to high amounts of over control as a child. Perhaps Black never felt as though he could release his feelings because he was forced to grow up so quickly. Due to this, he later became exceedingly aggressive, and later violent. He was so over controlling on his own emotions, that when he finally released his anger, he committed murder.
A key emotional event that happened in his life where he had little to no ability to have an emotional response was the death of his mother.

He states in the novel that it was the worst pain he had ever experienced. He had no choice from that point but to be an independent person and work for himself, as he didn’t have parents to lean on. It was soon after his parents died that he became violent, at age fifteen (“Black” & Fisher). It was there that he experienced his aggressive outburst, most likely from holding in all his trauma from his childhood for so long. It is said that aggression by people who experience high levels of trauma necessary to overcome have murderous intensity in their aggression (Megargee,

1966).
Evolutionary Theory of Crime:
Beyond a traditional theory of crime, such as over controlled hostility, that could explain Joey Blacks criminal behavior, an evolutionary theory of crime could also explain why he became so violent, and eventually murderous. Evolutionary Psychology in the realm of crime explains theories through natural selection. Natural selection is the concept that organisms who survive and thrive pass on their successful genes to their offspring, and they most likely produce the most offspring, whereas organisms who do not survive or thrive well, will not have successful offspring (Camilleri, 2017). Within natural selection in the term adaptation. Adaptation suggests that a trait is preserved within natural selection because it promoted reproductive success, and benefits an individual in their environment. (Buss, 2016)
I would argue that Joey Black’s criminal behavior could possibly be the result of a facultative adaptation. As explained, an adaptation is a behavioral trait that benefits a person it its environment, and furthermore, goes on to assist in reproductive success (Buss, 2016) I would go further on to state, that during Black’s life, his adaptation was in the present. A present adaptation means that the adaptation is useful in our ancestral environment, or in other words, the adaptation was evolved in the current period (Camilleri, 2017). Black’s criminal behavior is adaptive because I would argue that Black gained adaptive traits to successfully move about his environment. These adaptive traits that he gained can be analyzed as flaws, “for good reason”. It is the thought that natural selection shaped Black to maximize reproduction under adaptation, and this thought is crucial in understanding Black’s psychiatry. (Nesse, 2015). He was raised in poverty, and his criminal tendencies in stealing money and violence assisted him in survival. Moreover, it has been found that “murders among semi unrelated adults due to correlations with feelings toward society have facultative adaptations to variable or unstable habitats that may favor aggression among adults. Human neural systems have evolved to facilitate such shifts in behavior” (Roth, 2011).
Furthermore, I believe his violent traits and tendencies are facultative, as they change and respond to environmental variations. Over the course of a lifetime, environments change, and genes are selected to deal with these changes for specific challenges (Roth, 2011). For instance, when Black was placed into foster care, he had to deal with a whole new set of challenges in dealing with many new sets of families. With this, his facultative adaptation evolved due to the environmental change, and to deal with this change, he became violent to survive his not so ideal circumstances, in dealing with abuse. The violence, due to his facultative genes responding to environmental, gave him the ability to change himself to adapt.
Traditional or Evolutionary for Joey Black:
I analyzed the Overcontrolled Hostility Theory, where the suppression of emotion calls for a large outburst in violence and aggression (Camilleri, 2017), and I also analyzed theories and concepts in evolutionary psychology, where I believe the murderous tendencies that developed out of Joey Black are caused by adaptation, where a trait within Black forms to adapt to his environment, and furthermore could have promoted reproductive success in Black’s family. With this information in mind, I believe the better explanation for Joey Black’s murderous behavior is the Over Controlled Hostility theory. I believe this to be the case because I think Joey’s actions are a product of his own environment, and not necessarily something that came to fruition because of genetic or natural selection factors. The overcontrolled hostility can explain his process of keeping his emotions inside himself, and feeling as though the only way, he could express his feelings was through an explosion of violence. For a long time in his life, Black was abused by foster families, and the way he defended himself was through aggression and violence, most likely because of his pent-up anger from being put into the foster care system.
Although Black could have some underlying adaptive contingencies that could explain his behavior, I do not believe that the reason he murders is purely because of his biology, and the process of natural selection (Nesse, 2016). I think that a lot of why he committed the crimes he did, which was mainly murder in this analyzation, is because of factors in his environment. He was sent to do hits for high ranking mob members. He got his hitman credibility due to his innate ability to be violent from a very young age, and this was caused by the Overcontrolled Hostility. From that point forward, he was known as a violent person, and as a murder.