“My Remorse Was Hidden, Not Lacking, and My Story Proves It”:
How Successful Ex-Career Criminals’ Public Testimonials
Can Enable Support for Rehabilitation
By John H. McFadden
Your feedback is most welcome - please write to johnhughmcfadden@hotmail.com!

Advocates of rehabilitation for criminals believe that research may convince policymakers and the public that rehabilitation is worth supporting. However, most people are deeply convinced that criminals are incapable of benefiting from help. Why? The linchpin reason is that criminals lack remorse. They have no shame. Moreover, this is not just a non-professional’s view; the standard for categorizing psychological/behavioral problems, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual says that Anti-Social Personality Disordered people “lack remorse,” and that diagnosis fits the majority of career criminals. The point is that criminals do not feel bad about doing bad things so there is nothing to build on, no willing, and motivated person. The lack of remorse make criminals seem not only unhelpable but also intensely unsympathetic. People say things like, “Criminals just don’t have any feeling for anybody, so why try to help them.” In the face of this intensely held belief, research results tend to be too ambiguous and questionable to be fully convincing.
Research is essential for guiding policy, but changing hearts and minds requires a more personal kind of persuasion. Our nation’s long history of social change often involves personal testimonies of successful representatives of degraded groups, alcoholics, drug addicts, minorities, homosexuals, and more. Likewise, ex-convict’s public presentation of their own success stories have potential for changing people who are too convinced of criminals’ lack of feeling to take research seriously. Especially if parts of the stories challenge the linchpin idea that criminals lack remorse, people are likely to become open to reconsidering all of their closely related anti-rehabilitation views. The success story of Eddie Dedmon, a career criminal, and various audiences’ reactions to it will begin to make this point, and I will make a proposal to gradually develop this presentation into an increasingly more effective means of changing hearts and minds about criminals.
An emerging psychological point of view provides insights that can enable us to discover strong narrative evidence that challenges the prevailing view. This psychological view opens our eyes to criminals’ experiences showing that the opposite is true. It reveals that criminals are teeming with the most devastating, even soul-murdering levels of shame, or humiliation. Although a small percentage of criminals, ones who are diagnosed, “psychopaths”, do seem completely devoid of remorse, this psychology helps us seek and find clinical evidence that the vast majority of career criminals’ harbor this emotion. In them, remorse is only disguised and repressed, not absent. Moreover, clinical experience demonstrates that even some of the most devastated among them can be transformed by approximately one and one-half years of intensive, multi-service rehabilitation treatment followed by after care. Moreover, the heart of successful treatment—the difference that makes all the difference—is profound respect that is often coupled with intense feelings of familial kinds of love. The ability of profound respect to solve the psychological aspect of crime helps prove that disrespect is the remediable cause of this problem.
Some prominent professionals even argue that intense unconscious humiliation, or self-disrespect, is the cause of criminal behavior. Perhaps the most notable of these professionals is James Gilligan, President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. Moreover, Thomas Scheff, an award winning research sociologist, independently came to the conclusion that unconscious shame is at the root of crime and all levels of violence. In case studies of the Columbine murderers and another teen murderer, Kip Kinkel, I have helped explain in ordinary terms how feeling humiliated about feeling humiliated represses humiliation, making it explosive. Sigmund Freud was perhaps the first person to notice the connection between unconscious self-negating thoughts and crime. His “late Freud” theory has been elaborated by Bernard Apfelbaum who shows how unconscious self-negation is at the root of the psychological aspect of all psychological/behavioral problems.

Eddie’s story
Eddie’s story told from the perspective of this emerging point of view helps suggest that other career criminals truly are not only teeming with powerful, hidden humiliation but also are driven to criminal acts of desperation by it. Eddie was a career criminal until age 45, and he fit the diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder to a “T.” His first incarceration occurred at age eight. His behavior and personality traits qualified him for all of the diagnostic criteria for this disorder, including “a lack of remorse.” He was violent and dangerous enough that, several times, he was confined to administrative segregation from the general prison population, commonly known as “the hole.”
Despite this extremely troubling background, Eddie was transformed by anger management and drug treatment professionals and peers, and is now, six years after his last offense was committed, a widely respected treatment professional. He does some drug treatment and also is the coordinator for the Police and Corrections Team (PACT) in the five county parole district in and surrounding San Francisco.
You would never suspect that he felt troubled during his criminal career unless you were well versed about unconscious humiliation. I first asked him if, during his life of crime, he ever felt bad. After reflecting for a few minutes, he said, "No.” He sustained this view of his past despite many restatements of this question. However, most people are very sensitive to disrespect, and I knew that their sensitivity is the doorway to their hidden self-disrespect. Notice that “self-disrespect” is the cause of the painful humiliation, as in how the idea, “I’m a loser,” makes people feel bad. Disrespect from others triggers this buried self-disrespect causing great psychological pain and desperate efforts to get at least some relief from it. Moreover, it is well-known even among lay people that criminals are excruciatingly sensitive to and reactive to disrespect. An innocent glance toward a career criminal, much less a mild criticism, may be interpreted as severe disrespect and may provoke violence.
Aided by these insights, I asked about the names Eddie was called during his criminal career. He said that some prison staff called him names, like “dirtbag” and “animal.” Moreover, he said that he sometimes had to agree with them that he was an animal. In this euphemistic phrasing, he was unwittingly revealing that he suffered from intense humiliation. He considered himself “an animal.” This kind of window into a criminal’s interior is like the open door of a speeding boxcar. You see unmistakable evidence of something but do not have enough time to fully appreciate that it actually is there.
From the view of prevailing morality, the system of ideas for controlling behavior that most of us are raised to believe, this revelation would be unremarkable. An interviewer who deeply believed that criminals lack feeling would be likely to agree with Eddie and his accusers that he was, at least in part, an animal. So the interviewer would not notice how inflammatory and demoralizing is this disrespectful self-description. However, from a non-moralistic point of view, it can seem obvious that this self-disrespectful idea would, at the very least, emotionally cripple anyone who harbored it.
A more obviously influential example of Eddie’s humiliation surfaced during a discussion of Eddie’s violent acts. Eddie told me that he stabbed a man 17 times; he said he was trying to kill him. Why? It happened after the man had tried unsuccessfully to rape his girlfriend. When I first asked him about his motive for the attempted murder, he gave me a conventional answer. He said coolly that “you have to show people that they can’t take advantage of you or you’ll get run over.” He seemed to fit the stereotype of the emotionless criminal.
While that explanation does account for some of the motivation for the stabbing, it does not account for the extremes of it. Nor does the you-gotta-be-tough explanation account for another instance of Eddie’s violence. When he was robbing a grocery store at gunpoint, he hit a bystander across the bridge of his nose with the barrel of his revolver without provocation. This man was only standing still and cooperating fully with Eddie. Many years later, Eddie still muses about that experience, saying, “I still don’t know why I did that.” Regarding the stabbing, further exploration revealed that Eddie actually was driven by the kind of intense humiliation that many men could empathize with. He said, “It’s like the guy that tried to rape my girl was totally disrespecting my manhood—you don’t do that to a man.” In this society and perhaps many others, we take for granted that it is enraging to intensely disrespect people by sexually assaulting their partners. This reaction could make readers miss the point that the rapist’s disrespect in this case set murderous behavior in motion and that most of us would not react that intensely. Why did Eddie react violently with intent to kill?
My answer is that the rapist’s disrespect triggered Eddie’s soul-murdering, unconscious self-disrespect and that he desperately struck out at the person who seemed to be causing his great torment. That is a tricky idea, but when you know how that horrendous self-disrespect was created in Eddie, that idea is easier to understand.
Between age five and age eight, Eddie lived with his maternal aunt, because his mother, who also was a career criminal, had been prison. He says that, when he came home from school with dirt on his pants or committed any other similar degree of transgression, his aunt would either pour scalding water on his face, pick him up and body slam him, or hit him hard in the head with a cooking pot. The intensity and frequency of the blows is partly proven by his brother’s permanent hearing loss, and Eddie suffered damage to the skin on his face from the scalding water. Often, the offense was that, Eddie, who “could pass for white,” would stare at white people; his dark skinned African American aunt hit brutalized him for “wanting to be white.”
Fast forward to the grocery store robbery I mentioned earlier. It can seem no wonder that Eddie hit the bystander “for no reason.” The most important impact of this brutalization is that it communicated persuasively to Eddie that he was worthy of brutalization, that he deserved intense degradation. Put differently, this degrading treatment by the only authority in his life indoctrinated him to believe that he was a worthless, horribly bad person. As badly abused children develop, they are caught in a vicious cycle of behaving desperately after being brutalized and then being more intensely brutalized and so on. As Eddie began to act out and was incarcerated in the California Youth Authority, he became increasingly badly behaved and increasingly degraded by a wider circle of people in the criminal justice system. He was increasingly indoctrinated to believe that he was a basically bad and even animalistic person. Perhaps the most familiar term for the effect of this indoctrination is that he became intensely self-disrespecting, or self-hating. He believed what the brutal words and behavior communicated to him, because he had no other perspective of himself.
This soul-murdering degradation then becomes the explosive powder that even the slightest insult can ignite. Put differently, these people’s psyches are rubbed raw so that even the slightest insult can spur a wild, desperate reaction, such as shooting heroin hours after being resuscitated from a near death overdose of that drug, which is what Eddie once did. Or it can trigger seemingly unprovoked violence, as in the case of Eddie’s violence against the innocent bystander during the grocery store robbery. Or it can drive a person to over-react to severe misconduct, as in the case of the murderous stabbing.
Despite these plausible discoveries of intense humiliation, most people are convinced by criminals’ lack of expression of remorse, much less their sometimes cynical and even sneering attitude toward victims. Criminals can seem so convincingly uncaring, and it can seem bewildering to say that they only feel it unconsciously, or subliminally. What is that aspect of their experience about?
Gilligan, Scheff, and many others suggest in passing that self-hating thoughts are repressed, or ignored, attacked, and eventually forgotten, because, in our society, it is humiliating to feel ashamed. Another ex-criminal I interviewed put it as follows. After telling me that he has had nightmarish remembrances of the screams of an innocent teenager he was beating “to a pulp,” he explained, “But you never show that remorse to anyone; on the street, it’s a weakness, and people will take advantage of you.” Eddie said the same thing. Shame is a weakness, and if you already intensely believe that you are unworthy, you are going to do everything you can to block shame out of your mind. Gilligan argues that there is no greater shame, no more intense self-loathing, that the shame of feeling ashamed, the shame of “letting yourself” feel terrible about yourself. It is the ultimate personal weakness. He says it is the experience that serial killers, true psychopaths, guard as if it were a matter of life and death.
To help further to understand this inner problem, notice that, if humiliation is conscious, or somewhat acceptable, we instinctively seek understanding and reassurance that we deserve enough respect and love to sustain us. But when it is buried, the only relief we can get is through action. We can withdraw from life by doing drugs or slipping into a narrow life of TV and very restricted communication. Or we can attack whatever or whoever seems to be triggering our self-hate, as if to argue back against the hatred, dramatizing in behavior, “I’m not some animal or worthless nothing; you’re a monstrous person who is determined to psychologically destroy me; see how this gun barrel feels up against your forehead, you bastard.” Psychologists put it as follows; people “act out” repressed feelings. They have to. The alternative is to suffer literally unbearable torment that threatens to catapult them into a much more threatening state of mind. As one murderer told me, “If I thought about the murder I committed against that little old lady, the cashier at that grocery store, I wouldn’t be here; I’d be in a mental hospital.” A former delinquent who severely brutalized another teenager 13 years ago still has post-traumatic stress from the experience, which is a euphemistic way of saying that he is suffering nightmarish, unpredictable guilt/shame.
Notice that “unconscious shame” does not refer to a strange, other-worldly experience. Eddie was aware that he felt that he was an animal, and he knew that he felt humiliated by the rapist. These are ordinary experiences, but, in our moralistic world, we discount these experiences. We think of them as excuses, not valid reasons. We are unaware of the significance of them, not their existence. We are unaware of how horrendous they are and how much they push us around, but they do appear in consciousness.
What helps make the case that buried, fulminating disrespect, or self-hate, is the problem is to show what enabled Eddie to be okay and even flourish. Social scientists say that the cure implies the cause.
Just before his last incarceration in a county jail, Eddie remembers being furious at his daughter and grabbing her by the neck with both hands, making ready to choke her. As if awakening from a trance, he stopped himself before actually choking her and felt deeply shaken. While in jail, an anger management staff member told him that he could get anger management treatment in jail while he was awaiting his hearing. Because he was still recovering from the trauma of the near choking, he decided to try it. This is the kind of motivation that has helped other violent parolees to seek and benefit from help.
When asked what part of the anger management treatment most affected him, Eddie was certain that one thing was most influential. The director of ManAlive in San Francisco, Hamish Sinclair, conducted a psychotherapeutic process that ManAlive calls, “Loss of Innocence.” Hamish, who told me that Eddie’s account was accurate, asked him to recall what his aunt did to him. Hamish realized that this was the experience that caused Eddie’s loss of innocence, or his feeling that he was an evil person. They pressured him to remember it in great detail. He bawled uncontrollably for many hours. Eddie said that what he got out of this experience is that, “It wasn’t my fault, the person who did that to me—they were fucked up, not me. I learned that the people around me at ManAlive thought I was actually a good person. They said things like, ‘We’re all inherently good.’” Eddie added, “Their words affected me a lot; it set the tone for me to go a little bit further.” Notice that the words Eddie that affected him were words of profound respect, profound partly because they were such a dramatic reversal of what everyone else Eddie knew thought of him and partly because it is so rare for anyone to respect a criminal. It is like the profound, other-worldly experiences reported in the Bible and other widely-respected religious texts. Jesus forgave the “tax collector,” the government stooge who stole and raped routinely before the tax collector changed, not after, as moralists normally insist.
The simple version of the formula for the beginning of Eddie’s transformation is that profound respect counters, or puts the lie to, profound self-disrespect. Of course, Eddie’s spontaneous reaction to his violence against his daughter was influential. But it did not change him. Hamish’s and the group’s respect did. Moreover, it is important to notice that Eddie’s reaction to his violence against his daughter meant something to him. It meant that he was not the animal that he was at least partly convinced that he was. Here was a disguised instance of self-respect naturally occurring. However, again, his responsiveness to his daughter’s plight would not have begun to change Eddie without the profound respect he experienced.
Subsequent experiences in treatment add to the evidence for the point of view that profound respect is what most influentially changes criminals, much less ordinary people. At his hearing in 1999 just after the anger management experience, the judge said that he would give Eddie a new California Department of Corrections (CDC) number if he did not do something to end his life of crime. That meant Eddie would be spending the remainder of his life either in prison or on parole. The judge gave him the option of entering drug treatment, which Eddie decided to do. But Eddie is certain that he had no intention of giving up “the life.” He was going along to get along and planned to return to his life of crime. Eddie seemed well on his way to becoming one of the many over-fifty criminals who inhabit our State’s prisons.
He entered Walden House, a residential treatment center in San Francisco. Despite his intention to go along to get along, Eddie was unable to be hide his true feelings. He fought the treatment tooth and nail, especially the requirement that he “snitch” on other clients. He absolutely and openly refused to do so, and he often swore at the staff. An inexperienced program manager decided to expel him from the program for being “resistant” to treatment. He called the sheriff’s department and ordered a pick up. Two staff members intervened on Eddie’s behalf at the eleventh hour. One of these two staff members, Michael Simmons, told me that he argued for more than an hour on Eddie’s behalf, partly because, when he first met Eddie, “I knew he had a good heart, and I saw that he was afraid of giving up the only life he had ever known and accepting a new, straight life that he had learned to fear and even hate.” Michael also said that he saw himself in Eddie; Michael had been in Eddie’s shoes years before this experience. He is an ex-convict.
Think of what Michael did as follows. He respected Eddie as a vulnerable person in the grip of fear rather than disrespected him as a bad person in the grip of antisocial urges. This ability to genuinely respect criminals as victims of fear and other devastating experiences—as vulnerable, sensitive human beings—is what makes any treatment professional effective. It truly is the difference that makes all the difference.
Eddie said he was very impressed by what Michael and this other person did for him. Eddie explained that he felt that Michael cared about him and that nobody else ever had. Of course, no one is convinced by a single experience. It took months to examine and test Michael Simmons’ feelings.
Michael also participated in another experience that impressed Eddie. At many treatment centers, they have a process called “owning your own.” Clients are asked to confess any rule breaking they have done. Usually, there are sanctions for breaking them, but they have a purpose. Clients are asked to write about what they did and why and reflect on how they can avoid committing further violations. Eddie was in the re-entry phase of treatment and was allowed to leave the center. He had broken practically every rule except the three that are grounds for dismissal, having sex, using drugs or alcohol, and fighting. However, he had never confessed any transgressions, and he had every reason to suspect that a full confession would make the staff delay his release. Eddie said he made up his mind to be honest and take the consequences without realizing why he made this decision. He says, “It just happened,” but it is not much of a stretch to infer that he trusted Michael Simmons with his feelings. With considerable trepidation, he told his confessional stories. Surprisingly, the staff members were so impressed with his sincerity that they only applauded him. They spontaneously began clapping, and they did not sanction him.
Eddie told me, “That along with a lot of other little things that they did and didn’t do kinda like....it said, That’s what I want to be a part of, hanging out with people who treated people like that.” Then he broke off, saying, “I’m getting emotional.” I said, “That’s what it would’ve been like to have good parents.” He said, “It was a loving and caring environment. Walden House was like a big family; that’s a big word there.”
A more complete narrative of Eddie’s life adds important details that help to make this paper’s case. For instance, I asked him what he does for fun, and his story was disarming. He said that he likes to play bingo at the church, and his description of the little old ladies and their petty grievances and his excitement on winning helped make his entire story more believable. The contrast between that Eddie and the Eddie on the cell block or on the street running scams, knocking out people with his billy club, and getting sent to the hole is overwhelming. He also told difficult stories about a family member’s relapses and a time when he was sorely tempted to use drugs. He called a counselor at Walden House and told him what he was upset about, the thing that made him want to do drugs, and he told him that he decided to play hooky from work and go to a movie. His counselor supported him and mainly listened to him rant about the problem that had upset him enough to want a fix. These stories sounded so ordinary, so “un-criminal like”, if you will. He seemed very much like an ordinary man struggling with somewhat ordinary struggles. He calls himself a “work in progress,” and has no pretensions about his ongoing need for help. He goes to Walden House periodically and calls friends whenever he is intensely upset.
The most desired, socially approved result of Eddie’s treatment is that he has become a deeply respectful, caring man. He easily expresses respect for parole agents and other parole officials. Moreover, when he helps parolees with their employment and addiction struggles, it is obvious that he respects and cares for them and is giving them his all. His family life has plenty of affection and care in it. Eddie seems like a normal man with the exception that he is much more deeply empathic than most men are. He knows that anyone who does bad things is troubled and deserving of undying help, not evil and deserving of punishment.
A recent experience further makes my case. On March 20th, 2006, Eddie told me the following story. He said that, several months ago, he was talking to a colleague. She asked him, “Why are you frowning.” He said that “big emotions” came up; he started crying intensely. As his tears subsided, he became aware of a repressed memory. It was that his aunt had “slapped the shit out of me, saying ‘straighten up your fuckin’ face.’ He remembered sitting in the back seat of the car, and she would yell at him, saying, “Stop that fuckin frowning.” He said that, at age five, he didn’t even know what a frown was. He said that a few weeks after this “return of the repressed,” he was talking to clients in a group about how influences in childhood affect people. He told them this story, and, he said, “I started crying like a baby—couldn’t talk.” This is the kind of experience that is familiar to people who undergo intensive psychotherapy. Once you begin exploring your inner world, it is inevitable that repressed experiences spontaneously arise. This experience helps validate the depth and extensiveness of Eddie’s transformation and the source of his considerable unconscious torment.
It does seem clear that Eddie suffered from life long unconscious self-disrespect and that intense, profound respect rescued him from a life of crime despite his unwillingness/unreadiness to change when he first entered treatment. At least, this is a possible interpretation of his life that deserves to be considered along with the conventional view.

Reactions to this presentation
Partly because most of us are so deeply convinced that a criminal’s lack of expression of shame means that they do not have any—the most common reaction to this presentation is to at least partly discount it. Moreover, it is apparent that the lack-of-remorse objection to rehabilitation is at the root of a dense network of closely-related ideas. Put differently, it does seem to be the linchpin idea, the idea without which the entire system of ideas cannot be sustained. This appraisal was confirmed by reactions to our presentation.
Eddie and I first made this presentation to approximately 35 social workers, all of whom have worked in the criminal justice field for from one to twenty years. Their most prominent dismissive reaction was that Eddie was not reached by treatment. He “aged out.” It is well known that many people like Eddie “give up the life” in their forties. They get tired of doing crime and going to jail. Moreover, they are rejected by younger, more active criminals, who sometimes condescendingly say, “Yeah, back in the day, granddad.” The social workers elaborated their point of view, saying that younger convicts “aren’t ready” to change. One social worker even had a maxim with which to express this widely held view. He said, “When you’re in your 20s, you’re not even thinking about changing; when you’re in your 30s, you’re thinking about it but aren’t ready. In your 40s, you’re ready.” I was surprised by how convinced of this view they were; they knew of no exceptions to it. They had this reaction despite Eddie’s assertion both that he was not intending to change his life prior to and during the first part of treatment and that Michael and other staff dramatically affected him. Despite this testimonial, they had no reservations about saying that he must have aged out.
The most difficult thing to notice about the social workers’ dismissive reaction is what it left out. It completely ignored the heart of our presentation, the idea that Eddie was blighted by horrendous intensities of humiliation and that its counter, respect, rescued him. Uncannily enough, our focus on his internal struggle did not at all register. They just immediately launched into their own pre-existing theories. Why?
Their reactions are the subtle but unmistakable expressions of prevailing morality. This is the system of ideas out of which most of the specific objections to this paper’s view come. The core psychological understanding of prevailing morality is that people do bad things because they want to and because they lack remorse. There is no shame and guilt to contain the impulses. People say, “Criminals have no conscience.” This is the tap root moralistic understanding of bad behavior by which most of us are raised and by which the criminal justice system’s emphasis on punishment is founded. The idea supporting punishment is that it causes pain—the primary dictionary definition is “to inflict pain”—and pain motivates us to behave well. Over time, it instills a conscience. The aging out theory assumes this moralistic psychology. It says that, when the punishments outweigh the rewards, when the older criminal no longer is getting enough enjoyment relative to the pain suffered, he becomes “ready” to change.
It is impossible to underestimate the intensity and complexity with which our commitment to prevailing morality is held. Even many psychiatrists believe that our very lives depend on it. They say things like, “Without shame and guilt, we would all be barbarians.” In the face of this overwhelming pressure to believe in prevailing morality, it is no wonder that even educated social workers would completely discount a challenge to it, that they would not even register Eddie’s claims that he believe he was an animal and that he tried to kill a man because he felt humiliated by him. It discounts his belief that he was reached not by inculcations of responsibility to others but by respect and love for him. One reframing of his experience is perhaps most countercultural. It is that he was, in essence, respected and loved before behaving respectfully and lovingly to others. In a nutshell, he was transformed by forgiveness prior to repentance. In prevailing morality’s terms, he did not deserve to be forgiven. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, I feel obliged to add that this conception of change is reflected in Christ’s words on the cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do” or because they are caught in a set of forces that no nothing about. This is what Christian theologians have called “the Scandal of the Gospel.” Another reframing is similarly “offensive” to the moralist in us all. It is that Eddie was a victim who did bad things because of his victimization. He was a completely helpless victim of his aunt and then the unconscious self-hate she helped implant in him. These reframed versions of this paper’s basic view are truly daunting for us to discuss. They animate intense negative reactions, like, “Yeah, right; all you gotta do is hug a thug.”
This conception of the resistance to rehabilitation has the advantage of demystifying and prioritizing the struggle to change hearts and minds about criminals. It consists of a series of views stemming from the fundamentals of prevailing psychological understanding, that people do bad things because they at once have irresponsible impulses and have no shame with which to contain them.

A proposal
It does seem that the lack-of-remorse view is the linchpin view and that it organizes many of the corollaries that emerge in rapid-fire succession during discussions of the criminal mind.
In light of these and many other objections and the promise inherent in the view of criminals I have presented, I would like to continue on the course I have established in this paper, and earlier articles I have written. For instance, in response to the social workers’ age related objection, I have already interviewed the first of six successful parolees who fit the diagnosis of Anti-Social Personality Disorder and who entered treatment in their 20s. This now 30 year-old man tells a persuasive story that, with the exception of the age factor, almost exactly parallels Eddie’s. If anything, Darnell was treated worse than Eddie during his childhood. I will then present these cases to the same social workers who believe that 20 year olds “aren’t even thinking about” changing. I will not be expecting to convince them at this point. I only expect to at least temporarily remove one objection to make room for subsequent ones to emerge. Then, I will find success stories that counter each objection I discover. In a previous writing, I have already mapped out 16 objections that normal people hold. Ultimately, I would collect the entire corpus of taken-for-granted objections to the basic idea that criminals are teeming with shame and at least reasonable responses to them drawn from the narratives of successful ex-parolees.
I would also be creating presentations and workshops to help “change the culture” of CDCR. Parole agents and prison staff can examine their attitudes, the most prevalent and often stated of which is that change is “up to them,” or requires readiness or willingness. This unwittingly demeans the contribution that parole agents, guards, and treatment staff make to the lives of inmates and parolees. Most importantly, it misconceives what the problem is and what can be done about it. I would present to CDCR staff proof that none of the successful parolees I interviewed and heard about wanted to change. They were all rigidly unwilling; they had no thought of wanting to give up “the life.” Moreover, it is splitting hairs to say that they “unconsciously longed to be loved and respected,” although I think that is true. Their transformations were completely dependent on the intervention of Michael Simmons and other professionals at Walden House.
Critics of this proposal who are generally sympathetic say things like, “These CDCR staff just don’t want to change.” The same negative appraisal is often directed at the public. Even sympathizers with this paper’s point of view have the same view of rehabilitation detractors that the detractors have of criminals. This view betrays a mystifying view of resistance to change. The point of this article is to demystify the resistance to profoundly respectful views of criminals and to chart a course for changing hearts and minds that includes a collegial, respectful discussion rather than an authoritative series of lectures or policy decisions. My bumper sticker version of this point is, “Opponents of Rehabilitation Are People Too.” As I have argued concerning criminals, ordinary people are not mysteriously or perversely resistant to change. They are just convinced by deeply indoctrinated views. Prevailing morality is like a book of precepts that we all sense and immediately recognize but almost never analyze and reconsider. There is no other worldly set of psychological principles involved. At root, there are only commonplace issues of respect and disrespect to consider.
I began doing that anew during my most recent encounter with a few of the social workers who had adamantly opposed the idea that these criminals have remorse and are capable of changing. I was enlightened by Ray Jones, one of the principal architects of broad social movements in San Francisco and Seattle that resulted in well-financed programs for the poor. Ray explained that what worked for his group was a series of roundtable discussion at which representatives of opposing views are gathered. I recently simulated this venue in several social encounters with two social workers. We eventually agreed that only a small percentage of the criminal population lack remorse and are untreatable. A social worker with whom I was talking disarmed me completely by suddenly switching from opposing my idea to supporting it in her own words. She said, “I think that if you that anti-social personality disorders (who comprise the majority of criminals) can be reached by believing in them so that they can come to believe in themselves.” What had been entrenching her and others in their conventional view was partly my fuzziness about the exact population I was addressing. I had sounded like I was saying that all criminals are amenable to approaches like the ones that reached Eddie. When I presented facts and arguments to show that some criminals are not amenable to the kind of treatment Eddie received but that these were only a very small percentage of the total criminal population, these two social workers changed their point of view. It was if they had been polarized by what seemed my one-sided view of the issues.
I am making my conversations with these social workers sound much more straightforward than they were. There were tedious, disorganizing digressions and intense disagreement at points, and I think my skill as a therapist and conversationalist was important, as well as my knowledge of the field of psychology. Moreover, their skill helped too. However, Ray’s point held true, the point that free-ranging conversation in small groups is a necessary part of the process of enabling people to consider unconventional, emotion laden and dense ideas. My only addendum to his idea at this point is that, to convince professional staff, you have to speak their language and know the literature in their fields, because they use that material to make their points.
One of the best places to start learning more about how to convince staff, I recently discovered, is with people like Michael Simmons. I am now seeking them out and setting up meetings with them. What is striking about both them and the people they help is that, when I introduce the idea that profound expressions of respect and love are the difference that makes all the difference, they intensely agree and begin rhapsodizing about the people who helped then. However, within a few minutes, they split off into an entirely moralistic view of change. They say things that, when expressed to them during their struggles, seemed noxious, things like, “It’s all about making different choices.” Or they say, “People have to learn to take responsibility for themselves.” In the few instances I have pointed out this split and challenged the moralistic view by reminding them of their own experience, they agree, as the social workers began to do. There is rich material in these discussions that I will continue to report.