Inside the Criminal Mind

...It is only the average person's sense that everybody can't act this way that keeps us doggedly "punishing" criminals and trying to make them adhere to a "civilized" standard of behavior...

...When reporters asked the 21-year-old why he killed his victim, he shouted, "It was her fault...

...He wouldn't go to school and he wouldn't go to work...

...They seek out each other's company, both in and out of jail...

...Is unemployment the cause for crime...

...This compares favorably, however, with all other rehabilitation methods-from basketweaving to long incarceration to reading the Great Books-which have always piled up the same score in reducing recidivism: zero...

...They are such inveterate liars that they no longer know the difference between truth and falsehood...

...Improvements can only begin when we are willing to absorb the clearsighted, unsentimental analysis provided by books like Inside the Criminal Mind...

...Criminals are people who believe that might makes right-although stealth often works just as well...

...But it is astonishing to read Samenow's portraits of 12-year-olds who are constantly beating up other children, lying, shoplifting, setting fires, disrupting their schools, driving their parents to the brink of suicide-and who still fervently insist that it is they themselves who are the victims of everybody else's unreasonable behavior, and that everyone else is to blame...

...Criminals almost always despise the world of work, seeing it as a "slave's" way to make a living...

...If Samenow still has not solved the problem of explaining why children as young as two or three can show unmistakable signs of budding criminal behavior, this should not detract in any way from what is a brilliant and path-breaking work...

...If the criminal is...

...Us kind seek each other out," said one criminal, in explaining why he married an excessively violent woman...

...They generally feel neither guilt nor fear, and lack what we would call a conscience...

...Samenow sometimes seems to set himself against male behavior on principle...

...They treat each person as a means to their own ends...

...Yochelson developed his theories over twenty years, then died in 1976, just as he was ready to carry his message to the world...

...INSIDE THE CRIMINAL MIND Stanton E. Samenow/Times Books/$15.50 William Tucker Late last year in New York, a 21-year-old gang member killed a 23-year-old Harvard graduate while trying to rape and rob her on a rooftop...

...When we start to doubt these standards-or when clever lawyers and dimwitted psychologists make it difficult to enforce them-criminals just become even more overconfident that their contemptuous rejection of the world around them is the only right way to live...

...She deserved it...

...Criminals are simply different...

...punched his sister the other day and broke her mouth just because she wouldn't get him a glass of water...

...It is amazing to see how some extremely disturbed families are instantly at peace once the criminal member leaves home," he writes...

...He William Thicker is a contributing editor of Harper's...

...Its only problem is that it cannot succeed...

...Another paragon of circular reasoning, says Samenow...

...Rehabilitation, says Samenow, simply means waiting for criminals to admit their guilt and error, and then enrolling them into a crash-course in the mores of middle-class society...

...A few days later, a 16-year-old high school dropout murdered his girlfriend's 33-year-old mother because she tried to stop the couple from dating...

...All are liars and hide behind a mask of secrecy...

...After confronting criminal personalities at every stage of life-from unmanageable ten-year-olds to over-the-hill career criminals still looking to "sharpen their game"- Samenow finds a common pattern of thought running throughout...

...Elizabeth's Hospital for the insane, Samenow has spent a decade dealing with thousands of criminals...

...Quite simply, criminals do not feel the rejection, unhappiness, or remorse that liberal theorists are always putting in their heads...

...Constantly he is sizing up his prospects for exploiting people and situations...

...Nonsense, says Samenow...

...Criminals] are impossibly arrogant winners or revenge-seeking losers...

...The 21-year-old rape-murderer in New York, for example, had an older brother who just finished medical school...

...Criminals do not act out of a sense of inferiority or self-denigration, as psychologists have often suggested...

...If criminals are born, not made, then why is it possible to rehabilitate some of them-as Samenow himself believes...

...And who is to say they aren't...

...Such things happen as a matter of course...

...In fact, admitting responsibility for his own actions and accepting blame for his predicament is generally the first and only sign that a criminal may be ready for some kind of rehabilitative effort...

...I would argue that many of these characteristics can also be shared by some of our most esteemed citizens- entrepreneurs, explorers, policemen, astronauts, or pro football players...

...But neither are they just "people like us" who are somehow nursing a justifiable grudge against society...

...These problems become embarrassingly clear when Samenow starts to catalogue the youthful activities he regards as precursors of criminal behavior...

...Often convinced that they are far more intelligent than most people, they live in "life's fast lane," despising "the square life, with all its loneliness and no fun," as one long-time offender put it...

...When an uncle of the 16-year-old was asked to describe his murderous nephew, he replied: "I don't know what happened to this boy to make him so crazy...

...Oddly, for all his fatalism and determinism, Samenow is convinced that criminals can be reformed...

...Exclaimed one man who shot his victim during a robbery, "That man must have been nuts...

...That premise, argues Samenow, has no relevance to reality...

...But the process isn't going to be easy, nor will it 'come cheap...

...Their behavior patterns were set long before they ever set foot inside a school...

...Some of my best friends are hardened criminals," recounted another...

...A psychiatrist at Washington, D.C.'s St...

...Samenow and Yochelson resorted to this method only after finding that criminals rarely enter any situation without sizing things up and immediately starting to calculate how to take advantage...

...Thus, it wasn't long before the newspapers and the justice system were beginning to assure us that, just in case we felt any sense of outrage about all this, we'd better get those antiquated notions of crime and punishment out of our heads...

...For anyone who reads Stanton E. Samenow's Inside the Criminal Mind, however, these brutal incidents fall into an ominously familiar pattern...

...Is it the prisons themselves that turn vaguely delinquent youngsters into hardened criminals...

...In this light, there are few, if any, of us who would not qualify as "criminal" at some point in our lives...

...Criminals, says Samenow, simply don't play the game the way most of us do...

...It was the police, the judge, the jury, the victim, their upbringing, "society"-anyone and everyone except the criminal himself...

...Have the schools failed these youngsters...

...Clearly, an "appetite for adventure" and other qualities of daring are far less important than the self-centered egotism, constant manipulation of other people, and habitual lying that often leaves the criminal living in a fantasy world of his own making...

...Although criminals differ in the crimes they find acceptable, they are carbon copies of one another in their view of themselves and the world," he writes...

...Containing these antisocial forces is probably the most difficult task we face today...

...It is hard for them to look at a pocketbook without thinking how to steal it, or to meet a woman without imagining how they might rape her...

...They often have wildly exaggerated fantasies about their abilities to succeed at a job, and quickly give up when these fantasies are not fulfilled...

...On the other hand, criminals are always happy to take whatever rationalizations society can provide, and turn them to their advantage...

...Samuel Yochelson, the former head of the Program for the Investigation of Criminal Behavior at St...

...This answer is neither promising nor convincing...

...When a criminally inclined youngster goes to school, he usually disrupts it and makes it impossible for other children to learn anything...

...He was always fighting, never listened to his parents...

...These issues, of course, have all been heard before in the abstract...

...A criminal has had, since childhood, a self-centered view of the world in which he believes that he is entitled to whatever he wants...

...The criminal believes he is entitled to whatever he desires, and he will pursue it ruthlessly...

...These qualities can belong to anyone, whether or not he has a sense of adventure, hangs around pool halls, or lifts weights...

...They are closer to being human than people who represent good, moral behavior...

...Instead, they are individuals whose personal evolution has set them on a destructive path of eternal one-upmanship that can only produce disaster...

...Youngsters are "criminal" because they "prove to one another that they are physically tough by deliberately inflicting pain-holding their breath, sticking pins in their arms, burning themselves with cigarettes...

...Given several years of draconic self-discipline in thought and action, however, Yochelson and Samenow found that some career criminals can learn to deal with the world's frustrations, accept the responsibilities of living, and start leading "straight," normal lives...

...He was no good in any way...

...Are the criminal's parents to blame...

...The argument is always the same...

...If it were really "all those other criminals" that turned the impressionable youths into sociopaths, how did "all those other people" get to be the way they are in the first place...

...The story about the 33-year-old mother, on the other hand, quickly disappeared from the headlines-probably because the victim was Puerto Rican...

...Criminals make impossible demands on other people...

...Words are not used to represent reality, but are merely handy tools for manipulating other people...

...The Harvard girl in New York, on the other hand, was murdered over only $12.] In what is probably his most memorable phrase, Samenow writes: "To the criminal, the world is a chessboard, with other people serving as pawns to gratify his desires...

...held accountable, he blames the victim for the violence because [the victim] interfered in the successful execution of the crime...

...They are not playing the same game as the rest of the people in ordinary society...

...Crime has its own internal logic...

...What I admire is that they can make positive decisions...

...Yochelson had tried conventional psychiatry, but found it only "contributed to [the criminal's] rationalizations...

...This is not to say that there are no problems with this book...

...Criminality is basically a habit of mind...

...Every society has had to deal with the problem, but the peculiarly self-indulgent nature of American society has magnified it to unprecedented proportions...

...Where does this leave us...

...There is such a thing as the "criminal mind...

...Instead, Yochelson-and later Samenow -developed a rigid, authoritarian regimen-a kind of "Criminals Anonymous"-where men who are trying to "go straight" are forced not only to discipline their own behavior, but to drive all thoughts of criminal activity from their minds as well...

...They think they are right...

...In the face of everything that is commonly written about criminals, reading Samenow's long account of his interviews with offenders of all ages is like having the scales removed from your eyes...

...Criminals are simply criminals...

...They are-there is no other term for it-a "menace to society...

...They are simply trying to conquer everyone-with each manipulation or violent triumph only whetting their appetite for still greater victory...

...They learn from each other, reinforce each other's values, and share the same view of the world...

...And, most of all, why does so much of criminal behavior sound like nothing more than ordinary human failings taken to some destructive, but logical extreme...

...Criminals are not searching for truth, nor are they seeking any kind of equilibrium in their human relations...

...Samenow's insights cut like a knifeblade through the stale smorgasbord of contemporary criminology...

...Within days the New York Times had written a long article suggesting the rape-murderer's problems probably stemmed from a head injury he sustained when he was struck by a car ten years ago...

...Contemptuous of the world of law-abiding people, they share the view that the responsible world is a barren wasteland...

...Other pre-criminal activities include having a "sense of adventure," "congregating . . . around pool halls," and "lifting weights" in order to "impress the girls...

...On the contrary, says Samenow, it is the siblings and other family members who are persistently victimized by the criminal child's manipulative and uncontrollable behavior, which is often clearly evident at two years old...

...They have an inflated self-image in which they regard themselves as special and superior and assume that people will do their bidding...

...The criminal believes that because he is inherently more capable than others, previous experience and training requirements should be waived in his case...

...Are siblings to blame, or does the family single out one particular child as a "victim" of its own pathologies, as some family therapists have argued for years...

...He is positive that his expertise and unique talents distinguish him from the common herd...

...All this, of course, flies ruthlessly in the face of the conventional wisdom that criminals are themselves "victims of society," and that beneath each tangled web of sociopathology there beats the heart of an innocent soul who only wants a fair chance to live like everybody else...

...How can anyone say this, Samenow asks, when the same families that produce criminals also raise other children who are sane, happy, and successful...

...It is always someone else's fault that they are in trouble...

...Even then, success only occurred in about one-third of their attempts...

...All it produced, he said, was "criminals who knew psychiatry...

...He often ends up sounding downright prudish...

...Quite the contrary, they feel superior to everyone else...

...Basically, he says, they all think alike...

...Samenow learned to distrust conventional psychiatric methods while working under Dr...

...They may not be genetically different, as Samenow suggests...

...Although he tries to dodge the issue, he finally embraces it by citing a few European studies with identical adoptive twins which seem to indicate that "genetic factors do predispose some people to criminal behavior...

...Nor has the society ever been created that could make criminals happy...

...To [the criminal], having a good time is what life is all about...

...This is an even more absurd premise, writes Samenow...

...Samenow's greatest difficulty is his precept that "criminals are criminals," and that, if anything, they are probably born that way...

...It is their inflated egos that make it impossible for them to hold jobs-not any lack of employment opportunities that turns them to crime...

...Society can do nothing with these attitudes except try to curb them and wherever possible keep them from arising...

...Elizabeth's...

...No society has ever been able to remain civilized for long while giving broad tolerance to criminal behavior...

...They are the all-too-recognizable pieces in a true-life jigsaw puzzle that Samenow has assembled in telling us what real crime and punishment are all about...

...She was a slut...

...At the same time, his lawyers were moving to suppress his bragging confessions on the grounds that the police had failed to contact a lawyer who was already representing him on a previous assault charge...

...They are master manipulators, only too happy to excuse their own actions as the unavoidable consequence of poverty, racial discrimination, a bad upbringing, uncontrollable psychic urges, or whatever form of "insanity" happens to be in fashion...

...I hate to say it, but he sometimes makes the criminal life seem positively attractive...

...All this, of course, is what most of us now consider an ordinary day in American society...

...This assumption leaves him supporting the uncomfortable theory that criminal behavior is ultimately genetic in origin...

...It wasn't my fault that he was crazy enough to risk his life over the fifty bucks in his wallet...

...If environment plays no part, then why are the bulk of criminals concentrated in the lower strata of society...