“When I feel recognized and have a sense that you understand how I am experiencing my experience (whether this is how you experience it or not), I can find your limit-setting tolerable and even a relief; if I do not feel recognized, I resent it as a violation of who I am.”  Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self

With very few exceptions, the violent people I work with in prison are not born that way; someone went well out of his or her way to make them into the violent criminals they are today.  Many are not capable of change or fit to go back into the streets, but many are.  However, our society’s best efforts up to this point to control crimes and violence may, in fact, have only increased it.  As Kegan notes above, people need recognition, to be seen and known, to recognize themselves perhaps, before they will respond to “limit-setting” – and prison sets limits without recognizing the people it limits.  The need for recognition makes sense to me, as a prison psychologist.  As one of my criminal clients said to me during an exchange, – “if it’s true for me, then it must be true for you too,” essentially telling me that he could accept a truth about himself if I would accept it as true of myself as well.

Working at a maximum-security prison of the old style, brick and stone and no air conditioning in the cellblocks, I grew frustrated simply putting out fires or doing segregation rounds.  I wanted to have a lasting impact on the prisoners, whether they got out again or not.  Less violence inside the prison was just as worthy a goal as reducing it on the streets.  Towards this end, I put together two treatment groups with the idea that the more information offenders had about themselves, the more likely they would be to eventually make informed decisions.  One group was called Missing Pieces and the other Damage Control. Missing Pieces had a curriculum modeled after ancient initiation rites, with Stations of the Cross representing the areas of experience and information typically excluded from the upbringings of the prisoners.  In Damage Control I wanted the men to understand what was wrong with them so they could do a better job of managing it. 

I worked alone with 15 to 20 offenders in an open-ended group, never a consistent number because of work assignments, medical appointments, lockdowns and inmates sent to the hole – segregation – for behaving badly.  There was a security bubble of unbreakable glass in one corner of the room enclosing an officer.  This officer monitored my group and the main hallway and controlled the gates in and out of the Watch Commander’s office area as well as the medical area across the hall.  I carried a radio with a red button for emergencies, usually turned down to minimize the annoying messages and static that would otherwise constantly interrupt.

A month into the process I administered the MCMI-III psychological instrument to the members of the group, at least those who weren’t too suspicious of what would be done with the results.  The mental health and corrections people I had spoken to over the years always reiterated the dictum that the majority of offenders had an antisocial personality disorder – a professional way of saying there’s no hope, no reason to put out too much effort.  I certainly saw signs of antisocial behavior in the offenders’ lack of trust, disrespect for societal rules, deep reservoir of anger, and tendency to act out in harmful ways, but I had my doubts that is was as simple as that. 

When the test results came back, the most prominent elevation was not the antisocial scale; in fact, what topped the list was the Sadistic elevation, followed by the Negativistic and then the Avoidant elevations.  Antisocial personality came in 4th, meaning there were far more variables than was commonly thought in the makeup of a typical criminal.  Theodore Millon, creator of the MCMI-III, emphasizes that we can’t take these labels at face value, but must look behind them as to what they really portray.  Sadism typically presents on the surface as adamantly antisocial.  But at a core level, it represents a person with deep, profound wounds who wants nothing to do with those wounds and will not let anyone, including himself, near the wounds.  This type of person typically carries a pain beyond his capacity to manage, process or dissolve, but presents a façade that is confident, persuasive, dominant and aggressive, even fronting leadership qualities.

I shared this information with the offenders, pointing out from the beginning that these descriptions were anything but flattering, but that the testing provided an honest picture of who the offenders might be psychologically – revealing what they had to work with, change, and/or learn to manage.  In Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann suggests that human beings operate on two levels – conscious and unconscious or ego and core – but prefer to focus on the ego level, where we identify with our morals and dis-identify with our wounded or damaged cores.  Neumann insists that a new ethic was called for in which we lay claim to our damaged cores rather than idealizing or ignoring them, that our work isn’t complete until we take responsibility for the entire psychic structure, not just the surface part we can shape and manipulate. 

In handing over the assessment information to the offenders, I told them that the MCMI-III is often disparaged by clinicians because it is said to over-pathologize, to make people look worse than they are.  I explained that I didn’t agree with this.  It is my opinion that most people, when in their ego state, are well behaved and play by the same rules as others.  But, when their core is stirred up, people change as drastically as Jekyll and Hyde, if only for seconds or minutes – enough time for a person to commit a crime earning decades in prison.  Therefore, the MCMI-III results are best at showing a picture of what a person is like at his worst, under pressure, backed into a corner.  It is not meant to be flattering or supportive.  When a person is at his worst, his deepest flaws come to the fore and that is when he is most likely to engage in destructive behaviors.  If flaws are visible, he can identify them and have a much better chance of devising a strategy to manage them. 

I compared their psychological state to a dormant virus such as the herpes:  the virus is asleep most of the time, buried so deep in the body that ordinary antibiotics are unable to root it out.  When a virus carrier is non-symptomatic, he or she can readily believe they do not have the disease.  However, once the virus is triggered by stress, it comes to life, creating lesions and magnifying its contagion. 

Utilizing Millon’s work and his breakdown of each of the three types (sadism, negativism, avoidance) into subtypes (distinctive ways each type could present itself), I wrote the following description of the virus that I believe inhabited the offenders in the group and distributed a copy to each of the group members to read and discuss.  There were eight components to this picture:

1. At some point you were treated viciously – you were kicked in the gut over and over, run over by a truck, beaten with a bat, hammer, pipe or furious fists – shown no mercy, no compassion, no love (or, a very sick love).  It didn’t completely wipe you out or destroy who you are, but it poisoned you and threatens to overwhelm what’s left of your own internal goodness.  These wounds haven’t stopped hurting and may still hurt so much (perhaps at such a deep level you forget they’re there, or, you’re just so used to it you think it’s normal) that they make it difficult for you to focus on anything else, so you act like a crazy, wild horse with a burr under its saddle.

2. If you are wounded psychologically, as this profile strongly suggests, you carry a charge – an explosive energy that can be released when provoked or stimulated – intentionally or inadvertently.  You will typically turn that explosive energy against others rather than against yourself – externalize the explosive charge rather than internalize it – so you are far more likely to attack someone else than to harm yourself.  Plus, your proclivity towards drug and alcohol use, and the dis-inhibiting effects of drugs and alcohol, makes this externalization all the more likely, and all the more likely to be out of control when it does happen.

3. With this overall profile, you may act like someone in a critical burn unit.  You may be so raw on a core level that the slightest insult or pressure brings immense pain and quick, angry reactions.  Burns are very painful to heal and so are deep psychological wounds.  A lot of you will choose instead to be gloriously fucked up, reveling in your craziness, happy to be mad dogs.

4. Drugs and alcohol would be a bad mix with the pathologies/issues outlined above – would tend to unleash or dis-inhibit them, creating even more dangerous and/or destructive possibilities.  Drugs and alcohol could easily be seen as a fuse utilized for lighting an explosive or bomb with – the components above describe the nature of the explosive.  The more drugs or alcohol, the bigger the blast.  At the same time, you are likely to use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate; to minimize the suffering, discomfort and inner torment these issues are likely to bring, and a way to get numb or replace the inner knots with momentary pleasure or relaxation.

5. Intimate, lasting, reciprocal, healthy relationships will be difficult for you.  The relationships will more likely be defined by power and control than by love and reciprocal trust.  Relationships aren’t likely to last long unless the other person is pimped – kept in line through breaking the other person down into their weaknesses, keeping them pinned to their neediness, and never letting them feel worthwhile because then they’d probably leave.

6. Those of you with a high elevation on the avoidant scale live as if in a room with hot coals on the floor.  You’re never comfortable, always on edge, never fully relaxed, living in a no man’s land of sorts.  Maybe you can develop a persona or mask that makes you seem at ease or relaxed on the outside, but inside it’s never that way and you’re always just a hair’s breadth away from showing how uptight you really are.

7. Your conscience, empathy and compassion need to be developed, like building muscles from scratch.  They will not come naturally.  A semblance of them may be present at times, but when the pathologies kick in, they will likely disappear in a flash, even in relation to loved ones.  Conscience or empathy will initially be more like scabs, easily scraped off by the slight friction, by little bumps and jabs, barely covering the unhealed wounds.  The wounds will take a lot of work, a lot of time, to heal sufficiently so that they don’t break open easily and can actually start to heal a little.

8. Recovering from the above profile is a long, uphill climb, but it’s do-able.  It will just take a while to get some momentum going, and some time will pass before you start to really notice the rewards that come from managing your deepest wounds. Therapy is like having your burned flesh scraped off so it can heal – very painful because it wakes up the wound every time until it actually starts to heal over.  The pain can be unbearable, especially if you have no dependable support system.  Usually, by the time you start to want to change, you’ve already pissed off and alienated your family, children, wife or lover, friends and colleagues. 

I informed the offenders that having this profile, one that is so deeply pathological and volatile, did not guarantee they would act out in the ways described above, but simply showed what they were potentially up against.  I reminded them of the purpose of the testing in the first place – to create the possibility of informed choice – and that the more they knew about themselves and their wounds, the greater chance they had of making better choices, of taking their flaws and patterns into consideration, of not being blind to their problems and all the more dangerous because of it.  I wrote in the handout I gave them that “hopefully this information will help move you from being a mad dog to a seeing-eye dog, something that guides your steps rather than runs wild, gnashing its teeth.”

The MCMI-III interpretive profile gives a picture that is much more complex than what the label, anti-social, would imply.  It paints a picture of an offender who has choices, who has issues he struggles with, and it couches those issues in more human terms. Anti-social personality disorder represents an Axis II diagnosis on the DSM-IV.  In general, Axis II problems are not considered treatable, the damage being so fundamental as to be impervious to therapeutic intervention. Anti-social is essentially code for being a hard-core, intractable criminal.

This approach of leading from inside has more effect than role-modeling, mentoring or clinical badgering and intimidation.  It demonstrates Neumann’s New Ethic in that the offenders are held responsible for what would otherwise be considered their unconscious.  In reality, the prisoners are not unconscious; they readily recognize themselves in the description once it is articulated for them.  Then they fine tune it by asking questions and exchanging stories, jumping from there to understanding why they committed the crimes they did and why they relied on drugs and alcohol.  The approach doesn’t require shame or cognitive behavioral reshaping of thoughts and feelings.  It doesn’t rely on affirmations leaching downwards into the core from a beneficent ego-state.  Rather, leading from inside is based on respect, the most important commodity within a prison system.  If I as a clinician see and acknowledge who the prisoner is, respect his power, dangerousness, and self-identity, then he is more likely to listen to me than if I come in as the representative of a superior race of human beings who is bowing low enough to momentarily minister to misfits.

PART II:  TREAT LIKE THEM CRIMINALS & THEY’LL REMAIN CRIMINALS

 “What keeps on repeating itself in human nature [is] the idea that good and evil are mutually exclusive, and the desire to separate off the part of ourselves that we sense is less than spotless, dress it up in a different guise and then set fire to it.”  — Daniel Day-Lewis

The offenders wanted to know what to do once they had a working description of themselves they could live with.  They were concerned that no matter what they did, no matter how well they behaved in any given stretch of time, they would still be related to as terrorists to fear, lock up or get rid of, not as humans capable of changing or redeeming themselves.

The Attica Prison riots were an attempt to remind the outside world of the prisoners’ existence and suffering. The prisoners felt citizens were no longer concerned with what was going on inside the prison, so they must raise hell and restore the balance.  A prison is like the vas hermeticus in alchemy: sealed tight, nothing allowed in, nothing allowed out, but needing to be tended carefully, each alchemical operation carried out in a specific order to effect the proper changes resulting in the transformation from lead to gold.  You can’t just drop the raw materials in a pot, walk away, and then come back later for the finished product. Without the right balance, the penitentiary inmates are unlikely to become penitent.

This idea resonated with the prisoners.  They immediately complained about take-aways, privileges and seemingly innocuous benefits disappeared each year: no CD players, no coolers for pop.  They brought up the poor quality of the food, the long time before windows were repaired.  Before the group turned into a trash-the-prison session, we steered in a new direction.  I talked about the roots of violence, societal conditions that contribute to the generation of violence and crime.  Working off a list I had prepared, the offenders endorsed most of the roots, but in simpler language than I had presented them:

• We don’t have an internalized value system, or it disappears when we need it most.

• We’re full of anger and rage that we usually express badly.

• We don’t like dealing with our own shit – it’s easier to blame someone or something else.

• Corporations don’t get punished for their crimes, but we do, and sometimes corporations harm far more people than we do.

• The people that raised us, or are raising our kids for us, don’t know what they’re doing – they never grew up themselves.  Nor did we, for that matter.

• We’re so desperate to belong, to have people who admire or care about us, that we  naturally choose gangs.       

• When we don’t feel valued in general, crime and drugs become ways to get  mirroring needs met – to feel good about ourselves or have someone take us seriously.  If we stick a gun in someone’s face, they suddenly respect us and want to please us.

• Violence, stealing and drugs provide a sense of freedom, a release from the day-to-day crap that our life normally consists of.  Drugs and alcohol are often the main things worth living for.

• We’re invisible now and we were invisible before – we’re like the dead.  People write us off, so what difference does it make what we do?  Things can’t get much worse.

These ideas were not the result of a neat little discussion after which we agreed on talking points.  The coherency here is a result of piecing together dozens of hours of sessions over many months with an ever-changing group of offenders.  We worked best when we revisited important topics, kept working them, so the offenders had time to think about them and could work on their assignments in the meantime.  Later, when I asked offenders what they wanted done on the outside, the streets, they took a while to come up with a list, but when they did it focused on practical things: pre-natal and child care, after school programs, better nutrition, earlier screening for mental health issues (most offenders never received any assessment or treatment until incarcerated), identification of and intervention in dysfunctional families, and most important, education that goes beyond reading and writing to include psychological training in how to live and deal with emotions.  The emphasis was “do this rather than build more prisons” (Texas has 111), and, “Pay attention! No one paid attention when we were growing up – now that we’re in prison, we’re forgotten again.”  And the final chorus: “By the time we’re in prison, it’s too late.”

After much discussion, the majority of offenders came to a consensus: they know they’re not getting out anytime soon, some not at all.  At the same time, they still want to know what to do.  They are willing to take responsibility for their acts, but they also want the larger society to take note of the conditions that made their mistakes more likely, that helped them become violent criminals who deserved isolation and extreme forms of external control.  Recognizing they had no control over what the outside world would or would not do, the offenders asked: “What are we willing to do – how will we do our part?”

We reviewed the list of complaints, roots of violence, and recommendations for the outside world and tried to come up with complimentary issues they could focus on while incarcerated, especially efforts within their means, given the limited resources and access they had inside a maximum-security facility.  Even so, the effort was impressive:

•  Attending the Missing Pieces or Damage Control groups was part of such an effort, letting offenders make up some  for non-existent rites of passage and learn basic psychological concepts so they could practice self-awareness and make better choices, catch up on some of their psychological development.

• Joining 12-step groups was a big factor.  When run well, those groups can eventually provide a sense of community and accountability as well as a way to work through past guilt and shame related to bad behavior, especially under the influence.  The groups gave attendees a way to work at excavating their inner lives so they can regain access to their spiritual core and begin exercising a conscience rather than just experiencing guilt after bad actions.  Developing and using one or more sponsors was a way to begin breaking down isolation and fatal independence.

• Staying in touch with children and siblings is necessary.  A tragic comment that was expressed repeatedly in the groups came from offenders who referred to their own siblings and children as the future felons of America. They usually felt helpless about this.  But we noted numerous ways they could begin to counter this through phone calls, letters, gifts of books, more regular visitation at the prison (rather than cutting everyone off out of shame), and encouraging those on the outside to use resources available in the community before things get completely out of hand.

• Signing up for anger management, sleep management, and relaxation groups when available to gain more skills is a must.  Such groups make it less likely prisoners will lose good time by going to segregation on a regular basis.  Aristotle said: “Anyone can become angry – that is easy.  But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purposes, and in the right way – this is not easy.”

• Figuring out their deepest needs and trying to get them met legitimately, or, if it can’t get met legitimately, figuring out how to live without it is a challenge.  The French phrase, necessite’ ne pas de Loi (necessity knows no law), became a mantra in the group as it captured what happens when a person ignores essential needs or lets them get met in a backhanded kind of way.  “I wanted respect, but I couldn’t ask for it, so I robbed a stranger and beat him down,” said one offender.

• Developing an imaginal eye would be a good safeguard.  Many inmates noted how, after watching films with a group worksheet in hand, they could no longer watch TV movies without “seeing things.”  Offenders might have watched a movie several times before and never noticed how it commented on drug use or parenting issues; they previously watched to be entertained, nothing else. 

Several offenders noted that we Americans tend not to address problems until they’re out of control, and even then, seldom address the roots, focusing rather on the symptoms, which almost guarantees a re-occurrence.  The consensus was that we too seldom learn from our mistakes and just recycle them.  The offenders also agreed that the roots of violence are all our responsibility – if it’s true for them, it’s true for you – quid pro quo.  

The degree to which each of these conditions is ignored and not addressed will determine the degree of violence enacted in our culture, and inside our prisons.  Much of that violence will occur downstream, not in the front yards of those contributing the most to maintaining or ignoring these conditions.  The offenders agreed they can’t blame any or all of these conditions for their presence in prison.  They can see the contributions these factors made but also acknowledged it was on them as individuals to be responsible for the choices they made.

THE TERRIFYING CONCLUSION

As Jungians, we should not be afraid of technology such as the MCMI-III.  We just have to add imagination, color outside the lines, use these instruments to help people see themselves accurately and then act accordingly.  Technology such as the MCMI-III can aid tremendously in providing offenders with a picture of themselves they can embrace.  These offenders respond best when they feel seen and understood, even if the reality is ugly and perhaps beyond repair.

These offenders are scary, especially the younger ones.  They don’t play by the same rules most of us do.  They don’t speak the same language.  They aren’t swayed by the arguments that would sway us.  Good advice won’t do it.  Trying to swamp them with goodness won’t do it.    Once we admit this, we are one step down the road towards helping these offenders and reducing violence.  They have to be met where they are, horrible as that place may be.  These are damaged people whose wounds have to be acknowledged, as do the depth of the roots of those wounds, going back generations and having many contributors.  If they don’t feel seen and understood, they won’t listen, they won’t consider change.

The only cure at this point is core-level change and a language that speaks to that core level.  In my experience, role models don’t work well anymore; the offenders who need help the most are too cynical and self-centered.  Punishment doesn’t work; offenders take pride in how much suffering they can take on, and they laugh at those trying to hem them in.  A regular education doesn’t work; many don’t care about it and have no real reason to use those skills even if they were to acquire them.  Rather, there has to be a kind of education that speaks their language, speaks truth to their core and the damage that has occurred there.  Anything less, however well funded and intended, may make the helpers feel better, but won’t succeed. 

Malcolm X was asked, near the end of his life, if his earlier years as a criminal who stole, sold drugs, and shot at people didn’t invalidate or cancel out his later development as a spiritual leader. He replied, “To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.”  The majority of offenders find those words reassuring.  A criminal can fully acknowledge his or her criminality, and, at the same time, fully support efforts to stop creating people like him or herself, even while remaining ensconced in many of the same criminal attitudes and deserving to remain locked up for the rest of his or her sentence, perhaps the rest of their life.