Those Who Crossed the Line : A look at the lives of American murderers : THE VIOLENCE OF OUR LIVES: Interviews With American Murderers, <i> By Tony Parker (Henry Holt & Co.: $22.50; 235 pp.)</i>

Our society is steeped in senseless murder. News bulletins remind us daily of the mindless carnage plaguing our cities. Mayhem has become so commonplace that we are hardly provoked anymore, except in the political season, when cowboy candidates play to our fears with their favorite covered-wagon cure: build more prisons, jail more criminals, and soaring violence will tumble.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as Tony Parker shows in “The Violence of Our Lives.” Parker’s collection of interviews with American murderers drops the veil of cliches that hangs over talk-show confessions. Without sensationalism, his subjects describe their lives, ranging from poor to upper middle-class. Most were high on some kind of drug when they killed in acts that were, on the whole, crimes of passion.

In reading their stories I felt they were groping for an answer, for a reason why they committed murder, not so much for the reader but for themselves. Even though they have spent many years in prison, their feelings of bereavement seem raw and fresh, both for themselves and their victims. There is no going back or giving life once it has expired.

Almost without exception, education is the pivotal milestone in their rehabilitation. Before committing their crimes they float at the mercy of naive emotions and devotions to people who, as they see it, ultimately betray them. Education is the clarion call that somberly works their conscience, informing them that what they have done has changed them forever. They do not try to justify what they have done, nor to explain it away with philosophy. Rather, the shadow of their victim throws its dark pall over their every waking dawn; it can only hint at the mystery of why they are where they are.

I found myself struggling with them to find answers to their moral dilemma. My life, your life, all our lives run parallel to theirs, having more boundaries than gaps. That’s why I wanted to understand why they killed, but I have no clear answers. What I found arresting in Parker’s interviews were not so much the facts and figures we so love to leverage to argue some sociological point, but the unquantifiable levels of loneliness, hopelessness and fear that consumed these prisoners before they committed their crimes.

I understand only too well that I’m sounding maudlin and sentimental here; seemingly spinning an apologia for those who would sigh in autumn’s fragrant rose garden. But what I’ve concluded after being incarcerated for years in an Arizona maximum-security prison and after spending many more years studying the criminal mind, is that what accounts for most crimes, including and most pointedly murder, is the absence of age-old emotions we’ve needed since time immemorial: love, security, relationships, self-esteem.

After you’ve read Parker’s stories you will be moved; you might even change your mind on capital punishment or the DNA theory of deviant behavior. Hopefully, you’ll put a human face on what we usually see as the dope fiend or drug addict or heinous killer and realize that they are simply people who tragically crossed the line.

We’ve created a society that demands revenge. Punishment and legal execution are supposed to mitigate crime, reduce recidivism, dissuade those who might commit murder and otherwise enhance our sense of safety. But as the statistics show, they haven’t and in the process we’ve ransomed off our freedoms one by one. We hope that if we go far enough--if we build higher walls, install expensive anti-theft alarms, arm ourselves to the teeth, employ regiments of police officers to patrol our streets, legislate harsher mandatory sentences and build more prisons that immediately brim beyond capacity with younger and younger felons, we will finally fulfill our yearning for security.

But it never has paid off and it never will, for we are in this together, until death do us part, and sooner or later, those hundreds of thousands we are criminalizing in our penal institutions each year will be released. If we fail to enable them to work and learn and heal their own rage before they are freed, if we let vengeance continue to govern our “rehabilitation system,” if we continue to incite fantastical fears about monsters on the loose, we are only encouraging these criminals to visit us, our children or grandchildren.

Each of Tony Parker’s stories is a charred puzzle piece exhumed from prison burial grounds, offered by people whose lives were burned away in a few seconds. In the momentary light of their crimes and the subdued light of their storytelling, we might see something that can illuminate our current situation. Or we can bury them, retreat into our cozy coteries and stroke the domesticated book that does not bite.