In this chapter we present examples of offenders’ thoughts and feelings as experienced and reported by offenders themselves.1 We focus our attention – and theirs – on their inner experience at the times they offend. We try to capture this experience exactly as the person experienced it at the time, without embellishment, justification, criticism, or interpretation. We suspend judgment (and we teach offenders to suspend theirs) regarding the truth, the accuracy, and the morality of their thoughts. We regard their inner experience (and we teach offenders to regard their own inner experience) as purely objective information. This information is the foundation of our understanding of offending behavior, and the starting point of treatment.
Our approach is literally and wholeheartedly phenomenological, meaning it is based on the objective examination of subjective experience. Here the focus is on the offenders’ subjective experience: their thoughts and feelings as they experience them at the times that they offend.
The examples below are broadly consistent with the thinking patterns described by the authors reviewed in Chapter 1. However, it is not our purpose to identify patterns of thinking (schemas, distortions, or thinking errors) shared by these different offenders. Our interest lies in a different direction. We look to the concrete details of cognition and feeling as experienced by each individual offender as the source and explanation of his or her offending behavior. It is here, in the personal meaning of each offender’s thoughts and feelings, that we find the source of his or her offending actions, and the starting point for treatment (Chapter 5).
These examples constitute an argument for our general model of offending behavior (“A Cognitive–Emotional–Motivational Structure,” Chapter 3). That model interprets these examples – we suggest it provides an interpretation of practically all offending behavior – in ways that display the meaning and motivation of that behavior. These interpretations, in turn, provide the rationale for Supportive Authority as a broad strategy of intervention (Chapter 4).
The conditions in which offenders are asked to report their private thoughts and feelings are critical to the reliability of their reports, and we describe these conditions here at least briefly, and in a few cases extensively. In Chapter 4 we consider broader issues of meaningful communication with offenders, and the conditions that make such communication possible. Many of the examples presented here are drawn from Cognitive Self Change treatment groups, and the conditions designed to achieve reliable self-reports in that context are described in Chapter 5. In a few cases we suggest certain interpretations of these examples that anticipate later chapters of this book.
A young man incarcerated in an Australian youth facility broke an institution rule by spitting on the ground at a place where a sign was posted stating, “No Spitting.” He had no thought of spitting before he saw the sign, and no need to spit. He gave this account of his thoughts and feelings at the time:
I spat when I saw a “no spitting” sign.
I thought, “No one tells me what to do.”
I felt annoyed, (then) better.
He was asked to identify, if he could, any underlying “personal rules” that affected his thinking at the time. He answered without hesitation:
My life, my rules.
His report provided a plausible picture of his state of mind. More, his reported state of mind explains his action. Given the way he felt and thought about it, we can see why he did what he did. His perception of the sign “telling him” not to spit motivated him to spit, and we can see how that worked in his head.
The authors regard this kind of report as a complete piece of information, not as a sign, or symptom, or indicator of another, more important – or hidden – condition. This offender has provided “a snapshot” of his inner experience that requires no further elaboration or interpretation in order to understand – in a limited but important sense – why he performed exactly this offending behavior.
Greg was an Aboriginal youth on community supervision. He described the thinking that lead to a fine for travelling on the train without a ticket:
I want to get on a train.
I’m gonna jump on one with a ticket or not.
Couldn’t be fucked walking to the next station.
They’re a bunch of dogs (when he was fined by the transit police).
He identified an underlying rule behind all this thinking:
It’s OK to me, because I can.
Tom was sentenced to jail for simple assault. (Tom had beaten a man in a city park in order to steal his beer.) Tom had been released from jail under strict conditions of supervision. These conditions included a weekly schedule that specified exactly where Tom was to be, every hour of every day. It specified the time he was to leave for work, the time he was to return home, and the time during the week when he was permitted to shop for groceries. Specific times and places were designated for socializing with friends, and the people he was permitted to socialize with were listed by name.
For the first few weeks after his release Tom seemed to do well. He had a job and his boss reported being satisfied with Tom’s work. His probation officer reported no violation of his conditions. Then things started to go wrong. For several days in a row Tom was several minutes late returning to his apartment after work. On his weekly trip to the market, Tom walked two blocks out of his way to visit with old friends outside a donut shop. These friends were not on his approved list of social contacts. His probation officer was reluctant to return Tom to jail, but warned him that this would happen if he did not stop this behavior.
Tom attended a treatment group two nights a week. At one of these group meetings Tom was asked to report what went through his mind when he broke these rules. He said:
I sit at home alone and have these thoughts:
I know that if I do these things I will be going back to jail.
It’s really starting to get to me.
I feel locked up in my own apartment.
I really resent this.
I shouldn’t have to follow these rules.
Maybe it would be better to just go back to jail and get my sentence over with.
I feel like I’m not in charge of my life anymore.
I can’t stand it.
These thoughts carried a lot of emotional weight. When he was asked what it felt like when he thought “I’m not in charge of my life anymore,” he said it was very painful. He described going to the probation office to pick up his weekly schedule, and then throwing it away before he even read it. “It was just too painful to look at” he said.
The logic of Tom’s recent behavior gradually became clear. He experienced the conditions of his release as a threat to his integrity as a person. By breaking these rules, even in minor ways, he felt that he regained a measure of control over his life, and in so doing regained a feeling of personal integrity.
Tom identified these underlying beliefs:
No one has the right to tell me what to do.
I have the right to do what I want.
For Tom, these beliefs were so deeply held that when they were challenged –as they were by his release conditions – he experienced that challenge as a threat to his identity as a person. Given the attitudes and beliefs that shaped his experience – and the depth of his attachment to them – his thought, “I can’t stand it” was not an exaggeration.
Fred was a long-term inmate. He was notorious for assaulting corrections officers, particularly when they gave him direct personal orders. Officers learned not to give Fred direct orders unless there were several officers present. Whenever Fred committed an assault he was taken to segregation (solitary confinement). He spent weeks, then months on end in segregation.
When asked why he continued to assault officers knowing that it would result in this kind of punishment, Fred said:
I can’t just let them do it to me.
He went on to explain,
My achievements in here far outweigh my fuck-ups. But all they ever notice is my fuck-ups. They order me around as if I am nobody. When it comes down to that, I got to stand up for myself. I can’t just let them do it to me.
1. Randy arrived at his scheduled treatment group so angry he could hardly speak. He said he had been kept waiting at a door by a corrections officer. The group facilitator asked Randy if he could back away from his anger long enough to give an objective report of his thoughts and feelings. He gave this report:
When I came back from chow I was kept waiting in the hall for the cop to open the door.
My thoughts were:
What a piece of shit.
He’s on a power trip.
Everything he does is at his convenience.
I hate the bastard.
He thinks he’s superior over us.
Who the fuck does he think he is?
Fucking scum.
My feelings were: anger, victimized/belittled, irritated, aggravated, and disgusted.
2. At a later group meeting Randy described his experience of being arrested and detained for the first time in his life. This was more than 20 years earlier when he was 11 years old:
At age 11 while in a detention center I was told to quietly stand in the corner. I was so mad and felt so belittled that I began making a lot of noise, knowing I would be punished further. I ended up getting stripped, cuffed, shackled and thrown into the hot room.
My thoughts were:
Fuck him.
He can’t tell me what to do.
I’ll show him.
I don’t care what he does to me.
Who’s he think he is anyway?
I can do whatever I want.
Fucking assholes.
My feelings were: belittled, embarrassed, spiteful, challenged, vengeful, angry.
3. Randy described his life as a teenager by saying “I pretty much did what I wanted.” He described getting jobs, then losing them because he did not show up for work. He described borrowing his mother’s car to go to work, then driving around for hours with his friends. One time his mother confronted him and accused him of having “no responsibility.” He gave this report of his reaction:
My mother told me I had no responsibility.
I thought:
Fuck you.
I got all the responsibility I need.
What a bitch.
I really hate her sometimes.
The only thing I have to be responsible for is me.
I felt disgusted, embarrassed, angry, tired of hearing it.
Charles had belonged to a street gang in a large American city. When he was 17 he murdered a member of another gang. He had been incarcerated for 10 years in an American “super-max” prison when he began to participate in a treatment group.
Charles described a situation some months before when prison officers had confiscated his radio. Their justification for confiscating his radio was that it contained a speaker, which contained a magnet, which could be used to make a tattoo gun, which was illegal contraband. Charles’ reaction was to talk himself into doing something violent, though in this instance, and at least for the moment, he stopped short of actual violence. “I wanted to hurt someone” he said. He gave the following report:
They took my radio because there was a speaker in it. I thought:
This is a set-up. They [corrections] sold me the radio that way.
Every situation I get involved in is this kind of a set-up.
I think of past times: they took my art things once. Lots of other times.
It’s always petty stuff. Too petty to even think about.
Should I fall for it? Should this one be worthy of a violent act?
They take things from us just to pester us.
What should I do?
This isn’t the time. Wait.
I don’t forget how I’ve been treated.
I can’t and I won’t forget.
Whether Charles’ thinking about this situation was justified or distorted, right or wrong, true or false is open to debate. Most inmates would argue that he was right, because corrections had sold Charles the radio, and because most inmates are unsympathetic to prison officers in principle. Many prison officers and counselors would argue that his thinking was distorted. More to the point for Charles – and for the prison officers – is that his thoughts made violence against staff a real possibility. Charles verified what the group facilitator and other group members all believed they could see in this report: a clear connection between his thoughts (together with the emotional weight Charles invested in them) and a potential act of violence.
Charles was interested and engaged in the treatment group for several weeks. He was fascinated by the activity of “objectively reporting” his thoughts and feelings. He seemed genuinely excited when he saw how the content of his own thinking was leading him toward more acts of violence. He was learning to see interesting and important things about himself.2
Ross was a notoriously violent offender. Violence had been his favored way of making whatever point he wanted made. He used violence to control his criminal enterprises. He assaulted prison officers to prove – to himself and everyone around him – that he could not be dominated.
He once described how, on restless nights, he would “talk himself to sleep” by recounting in his mind all the injustices he had suffered in the course of his life at the hands of people in authority. He described working himself up into a rage, which eventually became so exhausting that he grew tired and fell asleep – a far cry from counting sheep, but it worked for Ross. In one discussion with his therapist, Ross described torturing a man to make him reveal his hidden money. When that did not work, Ross turned to torturing the man’s wife by crushing her fingertips with pliers. “I know I should feel bad about doing that” Ross said, “but I really don’t. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”
When Ross was 16 he was transferred from a juvenile corrections center to an adult prison because the juvenile institution could not control his behavior. A few weeks after he arrived in the adult prison, Ross took part in a riot. He and other prisoners took control of a cellblock and held prison officers hostage for several days. For his part in the riot, Ross was sentenced to a lengthy time in segregation. He described his experience in segregation in these words:
I whistled away my time in segregation. I knew they weren’t going to break me. I knew I was winning.
Ross returned to the general prison population as a hero. His status among inmates was established.
For a time, Ross continued to assault inmates and officers alike. Then he made a conscious decision to stop assaulting officers. He gave this account of why:
They [prison officers] started treating me rougher and rougher. One time they broke my arm hauling me to segregation. That was enough. I never assaulted another officer.
The prison guards had finally gained control of Ross’ violent behavior – toward them, and for the moment – but they had not changed his thinking. When Ross was released from that prison he continued a range of criminal enterprises, including selling drugs, selling stolen property, and enforcing his criminal interests with violence. He killed an acquaintance by hitting him with a baseball bat. The acquaintance owed Ross money, but was slow in repaying it. Ross said he did not intend to kill him, but he assaulted him “to teach him a lesson.”
Ross was serving a life sentence for this murder when he joined the treatment program. He had already served 12 years of that sentence and in some ways he had matured. It was no longer vitally important to Ross to be the meanest inmate in the prison. This was in part because other inmates already knew how mean he was and so there was no need to keep proving it. Also, he was not as physically strong as he had once been. But, according to Ross, his major reason for abandoning violence was that he saw the possibility of being paroled. At that time in that jurisdiction, life sentence prisoners could be considered for parole after serving 13 years. Ross thought he had a chance. He had no disciplinary reports for several years. He joined the treatment program to further convince the parole board he was fit for release. He did not try to disguise his motives from the program, but he took his treatment assignments seriously.
Ross cooperated with the program. He made no attempt to minimize his behaviors or to sanitize the content of his thinking. All in all, he continued to be proud of himself and saw no reason to pretend he was different than he really was. His mother visited him regularly and encouraged him to try for parole. He thought he could live with his mother’s help without going back to crime, and his proclamations to that effect seemed sincere. He wanted to use the program both to get out and to get ready to be out.
Ross had applied to be transferred from his current, medium custody prison to a minimum custody prison. He saw this transfer as one more step in his quest for parole. But his request was denied for medical reasons. Ross had a medical condition that the minimum custody prison did not have the resources to treat. When the prison nurse told Ross of this decision he was outraged. He gave this report of his thinking:
The nurse told me my transfer was being put on hold. I thought:
Great, another reason to hold me back.
They always come up with something.
Fuck this witch. I’m not accepting this.
I’m sick of being fucked over.
When will it ever stop?
How much must I accept without giving back?
This is just like every shit hole I’ve ever been.
All the time telling you your thinking is wrong.
But question the system and you get one more slap in the face.
I’m a bitter motherfucker and this system has been a large part in making me that way.
Year after fucking year of jabs, kicks, punches at my individuality, my person, my very being.
Like Charles’ report about his confiscated radio, Ross’ thoughts and feelings point pretty clearly to potential – but not yet actual – acts of violence. He was able to see that this thinking put him, and kept him, at risk of committing more violent acts. He said that is exactly what it meant when he thought, “How much must I accept without giving back?”
In another treatment session this same offender, Ross, gave a quite different kind of report that cast a different light on his lack of guilt and empathy. The group facilitator asked Ross if there was ever a time in his life when he had felt guilty. Ross could not think of any. Then he was asked, “Did you ever in your life do anything that hurt someone, and feel bad about hurting that person?” Ross thought for a moment, then he gave this report:
I remember my mother crying because of something I did. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember my mother crying because of something I did. Maybe I had hurt my sister or stolen something. I don’t remember that, but my mother was really upset.
I felt bad seeing my mother cry. I didn’t want her to cry.
Then I thought, why is she making me feel bad?
I thought, why is she doing this to me?
Then I felt better.
Ross had discovered a way of thinking – a cognitive maneuver – that effectively eliminated his feelings of guilt. In the correctional treatment field, it is called “victim stance.” Victim stance turns the tables on guilt. It covers a multitude of sins.3
Several other members of this group reported having a similar experience at least once in their past. Each of these men said that at one time in their life someone had made them feel bad about their behavior, and they escaped that bad feeling by thinking of themselves as being victimized by the person who made them feel that way.
We do not know how big a role this experience (and others like it) may have played in Ross’ life. It is even harder to generalize to other offenders. In this group session, we stumbled upon an experience in Ross’ early life (and in the lives of other men in this group), but we frankly cannot imagine how we might set out deliberately and systematically to find out if such an experience is typical of offenders generally. It may be that Hare and others are right in attributing the lack of empathy in psychopaths to a genetic, neural condition. On the other hand, “victim stance thinking” is very common among a great many offenders – not just psychopaths – and there is no doubt they use that thinking to deflect responsibility and blame from themselves to those who accuse them. And for some – like Ross and Charles – the feeling of being victimized by authority becomes a central, defining experience in their lives.
The kind of “negative reinforcement”4 that Ross experienced by thinking of himself as a victim is more typically used to explain the antisocial attitudes (and the criminal behavior) of offenders who have been truly victimized (Corson, 1989). This is sometimes argued especially vigorously on behalf of female offenders (Sorbello, Eccleston, Ward, & Jones, 2002; Bloom, 2003).
The three women described here were incarcerated in a juvenile institution for female offenders that included a rich treatment regimen. All residents participated in several treatment groups each week, including at least one group devoted to “victimization.” When one of the authors (JB) asked a staff member how many of these young women had been physically or sexually abused, the answer was, “All of them.” JB spent two days there visiting treatment groups and talking with staff and offenders, then spent two more days describing and demonstrating the Cognitive Self Change process to the assembled group of 60+ residents and staff.5
The explanation of that process emphasized its objectivity: the key to the process was to make no judgments at all about the quality of one’s thinking – good or bad, distorted or not distorted, sick or healthy, true or false – but simply to remember and report one’s thoughts and feelings exactly as they had occurred. He gave examples, and the young women (most of them anyway, and of course this is all JB’s personal impression) became interested. When he asked for volunteers to give a personal “thinking report,” almost all raised their hands, and several were enthusiastic.6
These volunteers took turns forming small groups in front of the larger group.
Georganne was one of the first to volunteer. JB asked her, “What do you want to report on, Georganne?” She replied, “My demand for respect. I get loud with staff because I feel they don’t respect me sometimes.” Behind Georganne and out of her view, her words were transcribed on a large chart visible to everyone else in the room.
One time I didn’t want to talk about my problems and staff said I should. I started yelling and was being demanding,
I thought, I can do what I want to do. I can handle anything, no matter how big or small. I’m in control of anything going on with me.
I felt angry and embarrassed. I felt embarrassed because I knew I was wrong but I was trying to find a way to be right.
Other group members were encouraged to ask Georganne questions in order to better understand her thoughts and feelings. She was asked, “Did it have to do with your self-image?” She said:
Yes. I’m old enough to do what I want to do when I want to do it.
She was asked, “Did it have to do with authority?” She said:
Yes. I don’t like to be told anything. I like being free. I’m the higher power.
I thought they were meddling,
I believed, if I do what people think they’ll think I’ll do anything.
These thoughts and feelings were all added to the chart. At this point JB said, “Let’s stop here, Georganne, and take a look at what we’ve got so far. Let’s read through the thoughts and feelings you reported having at the time.” Georganne turned to view the chart, and JB read the content of her thoughts and feelings. Then JB said, “Does that look like a pretty complete picture of what you were thinking and feeling at the time, Georganne?” She agreed that it was. JB said, “That’s a good job, Georganne. We can all see what you were thinking and feeling, and I think we can see how the way you were thinking and feeling led you to get loud with staff. It seems to me that given the way you were thinking and feeling, yelling at staff made a kind of sense to you. Do you agree?”
This session ended with JB praising Georganne for doing good work, and explaining that this is all we do for this part of the process: “We look at our thoughts and feelings and we see how they lead us to do things that get us in trouble. Good job, Georganne.”
Charlene was next to give a report. The process of interaction between Charlene, the facilitator, and the group was similar to that described above with Georganne. We eliminate those details here.
What will you report on, Charlene?
I always relapse. One day I picked up some drugs to give to my cousin. When I got home I got in a fight with my grandmother, and then I decided to use the drugs for myself.
Did you have thoughts about drugs even before you picked them up?
I have a strong addiction for drugs. Nobody likes me as much when I’m not on drugs. I don’t have people to hang with. People were talking about me and stuff. I don’t like to be talked about. I wanted their acceptance
I wanted to stay away from drugs, but I didn't want to. People were tugging at me. I felt guilty. I felt trapped.
What were your thoughts after you fought with your grandmother?
My worker [social worker] won’t test me. She doesn’t test me anymore. I won’t get caught. It’ll be OK to use just once. It’s helped me any other time.
I was feeling angry and hurt. But I was feeling excited.
I thought it’s OK to use drugs because my mom and dad used drugs
How were you feeling about yourself?
I felt weak. I didn’t like myself. I wanted to be exactly like my mother. My mom got killed when I was little, I wanted to be exactly like her. I thought I was exactly like her, like the very same person.
My image as a drug user was more comfortable.
Charlene’s thoughts and feelings were being transcribed as she spoke them. Charlene reviewed her words, and was asked if they drew an objective picture of her state of mind at the time. She agreed that they did. And she agreed that she saw the connection between having exactly these thoughts and feelings, and her decision to use the drugs.
Grace was next to report.
What do you want to report on, Grace?
My running away issues. I ran away a lot.
My sister dropped me off at my auntie’s and grandmother’s. That’s where I lived. She didn’t let me in. She didn't want me there anyway. Instead of doing the right thing, which would have been to go to my other grandmother’s house, I chose to run away.
Do you remember your thoughts?
I don’t want to be here. She’s not going to treat me right if I stay. Why stay with my aunt if I can stay with my friends? Things will be better if I go. Maybe they’ll pay more attention to me if I’m gone.
I felt sad. Upset. Anxious to leave. Unwanted. I was scared of my auntie.
I’ve always seen other people in my family run away from their problems. I know it’s a bad thing to run away. But I wanted more freedom. My family and friends all do it so I thought I could do it.
Abuse was going on, I went to court on my own will and hoped they’d put me in foster care. They didn’t. They sent me back with my auntie.
A lot of different things were running through my mind. I slept in the basement, like I was sleeping in a dungeon. One minute she told me she loved me, the next minute she was hitting me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to call them the next day, or what. I knew I needed to be there but I didn’t want to be there. I wondered if my friend might not let me in.
I was scared of my auntie. I was confused.
This “snapshot” of Grace’s situation and thinking raises many questions. What are the scope and consequences of her “running away issue?” Are there other, more explicitly criminal behaviors involved in her running away? Is her account of her life circumstances accurate? Is her behavior here something the juvenile justice system should try to change, or should the efforts of society be directed to changing the abusive circumstances she lives in? We do not have answers to these questions. We confine ourselves to the boundaries of the snapshot.
In this situation as she described it, Grace’s only “crime” was running away from an abusive household. Georganne’s hostility to authority (“getting loud with staff”) expressed her determination to feel confident that she could take care of herself without help. Charlene’s drug abuse and the thinking that led to her relapse was an at least understandable accommodation to the circumstances of her life. There seems to be nothing particularly immoral here, and nothing particularly pathological. What is there to fix?
Some feminist theorists argue that female offenders in general are not really criminal because their thinking (and behavior) is a “survival response” to being victimized (Sorbello et al., 2002). It is easier to sympathize with an offender (like Grace) whose “running away” is a response to her experience of abuse and feelings of confusion, than with an offender (like Ross) who uses “victim stance” thinking to escape feelings of guilt. Both appear to be behaviors learned through a process of negative reinforcement – adopting certain attitudes, and the behaviors that follow from these attitudes, provides relief from psychological discomfort – and both lead to offending behavior. They are not morally equivalent, but both can (and sometimes do) lead to seriously illegal, and quite hurtful, behaviors.
On the other hand, nothing requires us to apply moral or clinical concepts here at all. If we suspend judgments of pathology and normality, blame and innocence, and if we leave aside explanations in terms of personal history, life circumstances, and (genetically informed) neural processes, we are left with the simple logic of the behavior: in a given situation, a person’s thoughts and feelings lead them to perform an offending act. This is precisely the authors’ point of view.
This clinically and morally neutral point of view is illustrated in the following summaries of conversations between one of the authors (DH) and three violent offenders diagnosed with schizophrenia. The authors do not suggest that our cognitive methods are effective treatment for schizophrenia. Our point in including these examples is to display the particular logic of these men’s offending behavior, a logic that is linked to their psychopathology – in some respect, quite clearly linked – but is intelligible and coherent apart from that pathology.7
Each of these men had extensive and diverse histories of offending. The examples reported here focus only on their violent behavior.
Gareth’s violent behavior extended from early childhood into adulthood. At the age of 18 he was described as being “constantly violent.” Amongst previous incidents, Gareth had hit someone in the face with a house brick, thrown a man through a plate glass window, and attempted to stab his wife with a sword. In the past, he had threatened to place a hatchet in a doctor’s head when he refused to grant him leave from hospital. He also threatened to stab his partner when she told him that she wanted a divorce. His criminal convictions included assault, robbery, burglary, shoplifting, fraud, possession of illegal drugs, and driving offenses.
Gareth had a long history of witnessing, being the victim of, and perpetrating violence. Gareth’s stepfathers had abused Gareth and his mother and sister. Gareth’s own violence was triggered by situations in which he sensed that someone was going to hurt either him or someone he cared about. When this happened, Gareth said, he felt hopeless, like a helpless child, and felt guilty about not being able to do anything about it. His typical thoughts were:
I shouldn’t feel this way.
Who the fuck are you to make me feel this way?
I’ve been battered all my life, now you are going to take a hammering for making me feel like a child!
I’ll show you that I’m not a child anymore! Whatever you give to me I’ll give it back tenfold!
At this point Gareth described feeling “like a raging rhino.” His typical thought was:
I’ll fucking kill you!
Ryan was convicted of burglary at age 13. By the time he left school he had appeared in court for nearly twenty counts of burglary or theft. Between then and his early forties he collected further convictions for burglary, absconding from bail, stealing cars, driving while disqualified, possession of illegal drugs, non-payment of fines, assaulting a police officer, and threats to kill. This last conviction was reduced from a charge of attempted murder.
Ryan said that his violence is typically triggered when he felt as though someone was picking on him. He said that his response would usually be to ask them to leave him alone, but if they did not comply this would lead him to be violent. He described a pattern of thinking in which he would first think about not wanting trouble and feeling scared. If the situation continued, his thinking took a different turn. He described this typical sequence of thoughts:
The more I say “leave me alone” the more this person is going to pick on me.
He thinks I’m a pussy.
If I don’t do something he will keep bullying me.
If other people know they will also see that they can bully me.
The only thing for me to do is to make him get off. I have no other choice. I can’t walk away no more.
I can’t let this man get back up. I need him to feel my strength.
Ryan described his violence as linked to his belief that he is not someone who can talk his way out of trouble.
My options are either to walk away, or stop the situation by using violence.
But in his mind, walking away made him look like a pussy, and this was absolutely not acceptable.
Like Gareth, Ryan described feelings of vulnerability. For Ryan these feelings ranged from feeling afraid of other people to feeling worthless, evil, deformed, and an overwhelming sense of self-loathing. His feelings of evil and deformity were linked to his mental health problems. He described being afraid that if he did not stand up for himself, his feelings of self-loathing would get out of hand and lead him to further episodes of self-harm and eventually to rehospitalization. This suggests a paradoxical link between Ryan’s mental health problems and his use of violence: he behaved violently not (just) because he was unwell, but to prevent himself from becoming unwell.
Khan was charged with possession of an offensive weapon with intent, and had been arrested on several other occasions for carrying weapons. There had been incidents when he had purchased weapons and then handed them over to care staff without the involvement of the police. During conversations with Khan, he described how he felt vulnerable after disputes or confrontations with other people. He described this as feeling like a “toothless tiger” or a “helpless dog.” He said that this led to the following thoughts:
I’m defenseless.
If you are soft people take advantage. I’ve got to get an advantage.
If I have a weapon I will be at a higher level.
He described how taking a weapon away from him left him feeling that he was not a man. He likened this to “pulling out a tiger’s teeth, cutting off a horse’s leg, or clipping an eagle’s talons.” He added the belief:
These [weapons] are the things that define these animals.
Each of the three men described above had strong feelings of vulnerability against which they constructed self-protective patterns of thinking that entailed violent behavior. The authors do not infer that violent behavior among people diagnosed as schizophrenic is, always or in general, the result of such “cognitive accommodation” to feelings of vulnerability. We simply do not know. It is not our point or purpose to look for such generalizations. Far more to our point here is the discovery of the internal logic of each of these men’s violent behavior based on their personal (individual and internal) thoughts and feelings.
The generalizations that we do make, beginning in the following chapter, are of a different order. There we link offenders’ patterns of thinking to their overt behavior and to their experience of self, and interpret these connections within a comprehensive model of cognition, feeling, and motivation. This model, we suggest, applies to offenders generally, as well as to everyone else.
In this section we describe our experience with two groups of offenders that pose both a particularly high threat of harm to society and special challenges to treatment. The first was a group of 8–12 (the number varied over time) prisoners identified as “hard-core convicts” in an American maximum-security prison. The second was a group of six prisoners identified by their high scores on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
The circumstances in which these groups were formed were exceptional. In both groups, the offenders involved, the authorities that sponsored the group, and the group facilitator (JB), stepped outside their normal roles. The process of both groups could be described, in different respects, as experimental. The results were interesting enough to be included here.
The circumstances of these groups’ delivery are so exceptional as to not seem practical for large-scale (read “bureaucratic”) implementation, but some of the principles and strategies underlying them certainly are. We revisit these principles and strategies in Chapter 4 (“Supportive Authority and the Strategy of Choices”).
In prisons throughout the world there is a class of prisoner with special status and special importance in defining the social culture of their prison environment (Sykes, 1958). These are the culture-bearers of the convict code. They are proud to call themselves convicts (or a local equivalent), which in their terminology denotes an elite class of inmate (Irwin, 1980). They are typically not motivated to change, but rather take pride in being exactly as they are. They typically regard treatment programs, and the inmates that take treatment seriously, with contempt.
In Oregon State Penitentiary these men described themselves as “state-raised.” By this they meant that they were essentially similar to people who were not criminal and who had never been to prison, except that, from early in their lives, they had lived and grown-up in state-sponsored institutions: from foster homes to juvenile detention centers to adult prisons. In their eyes, they lived in a different world, and in their eyes that made all the difference between them and us.
A group of these men met with one of the authors (JB) once a week for over a year. The circumstances that brought this group together were accidental. Two men with the special status of convicts had, on their own initiative, decided to change their lives. They applied to, and entered, separate treatment programs, one for substance abuse, the other an early version of Cognitive Self Change. In treatment it was apparent that both these men were serious about change.8
These two men were among the most respected inmates in the prison: respected by other inmates and, in a grudging way, also by some of the prison guards and officials. Both had done hard time in California prisons. They had demonstrated the courage of their convictions. By the criteria of their own code, they were true convicts. One of them had risked his life by fighting and defeating, unarmed, an inmate armed with a knife who was intent on killing his friend. He later became known as “Folsom Kenny,” named after the prison where this event occurred. The other, Terry, lost an eye when he was shot by a tower guard in San Quinton Prison. Both had remained, through years of incarceration, fiercely loyal to the convict code of conduct, never cooperating with authorities, never backing down in the face of threats from authorities or anyone else.
These men’s decision to participate in treatment, and the apparent seriousness with which they approached it, caught the attention of key prison officials. It appeared that they were approaching the project of change with the same commitment by which they had held to the convict code. This raised a question in the minds of these prison officials and the treatment providers: if these men could transfer their commitment and loyalty from convict values to pro-social values, was it possible for others to do the same?
Prison officials approached convict leaders with a proposal to form a group. Other convicts held Ken and Terry in such respect that their decision to change opened a doorway of communication. A group was formed. A few convict leaders selected the original group members, and no new members were permitted to join without consensus approval of the whole group. All members had to meet the standards of being a true convict, and the convicts believed (no doubt truly) that only they were in a position to make that judgment with authority. Prison officials and treatment providers were willing to go along.
The group’s agenda was limited to one specific question: is it possible for a true convict to become a law-abiding citizen and accept and live by the rules and values of straight society? There was no treatment agenda, and no one was asked to commit to change. The agenda was limited to the single question. They were all willing to explore the possibility.
In one of the early group meetings, every member offered a description of what it means to be a convict. Everyone agreed with every description offered. Here is how they described themselves:
I see us as normal people who happened to grow up in the penal system. We didn’t have families like most people.
I like who I am.
I take pride in being satisfied with who I am. I don’t need to be phony for other people. I won’t be phony for other people.
I get along with people, but not with everybody. I get along with real people, not two-faced people. I don’t get along with phony people at all.
I’m satisfied with what I am to the point of not caring if someone doesn’t like it. Most people are totally false. People need to put on different things for different people, to please them. I won’t do it.
I take pride in being a convict. We know how to be loyal. People out there just don’t know how to be loyal.
What I project, what I say, is really what’s going on inside of me. Not acting tougher than I feel, or whatever. I like what I see in the mirror.
In here we take care of ourselves. Out there we’re supposed to call the police. If you’re truly a man, that’s your obligation, to take care of yourself. Situations arise that command a response from me. Being responsible is personal. A reaction is demanded.
Straight people are hypocrites. They’re always pretending things they don’t mean. Like, do you like your boss and all the people you work with? Most people pretend that they do whether they mean it or not.
People out there have other things they can lean on. Jobs and things like that. In here we rely on our values and our character.
In these men’s minds, straight society has got it exactly backwards. They are the good guys and we are the bad guys. They have moral character and we do not.
None of these men wanted to be in prison, but prison provided them with a positive experience of themselves. Their physical and emotional strength earned respect from other inmates, and to a certain extent from prison staff too. In prison they were in a position to create and enforce a system of values that supported their self-esteem.
In another group meeting, the facilitator asked if any of them had ever tried to change. To his surprise (given their satisfaction with being convicts), every one of them remembered at least one time when they had left a prison with the intention of giving up crime and going straight. But it had not worked out. They were asked to describe their state of mind when they left prison, and how that changed up to the exact moment, as close as they could remember it, when they decided to commit their next crime. Here are some of their stories of relapse into crime:
Story 1: I got out of prison, I thought, I’m going to get a job and do all those square things. I thought, all it takes is wanting to do it. But it wasn’t enough.
It was a hassle. I didn’t have any money for things that I needed. I gave my wife my pay and it all went for bills. I had to borrow $3 one day for gas to get to work. There was no money for partying or things like fun and a nice car. I see people 23 that have things, a car, a house. I’m 35 and got nothing.
Me and my wife started arguing. She said, “Hell, I was doing better than this on welfare.” That stuff gets old. I thought, man, what have I got to do?
I thought, fuck this, I can do better by hustling. I’m going out and hustle and get gas money to go to work.
I came in with money, threw it on the table and said, “There’s money. There’s more where that came from.”
It felt better inside doing it this way, without the bullshit of working.
Story 2: You get tired of being a lop out there. Doing it our way we got shit too – stereo, car, things like that. You feel proud. At least now you feel like you’re up there.
Me and my buddy came to Oregon. I got a job in a mill. I was doing good. No crimes. No hard drugs. A little weed, a little coke.
I couldn’t get into the community. They were so fucking square. I didn’t know how to skin a catfish or talk about hunting rifles or fishing rods.
I was doing well at work and got promoted. I didn’t take breaks with everybody else, I just kept on working. Then I started fucking up. I felt out of place, so I started zoning out. Instead of waiting to get fired, I quit.
I thought I’d get another job, but I never did. Finally I went out and got a gun.
Story 3: I’ve got a good skill. I’m a termite exterminator. My problem is, I can take orders from cops, like in here. I take orders from the cops all the time and there’s no problem. Out there I can’t take orders from anybody.
I was on the job and drove home to eat, maybe 12 miles to my house. The boss drove by and saw the company truck in my driveway. He called me into the office and raised a stink about it. Hell, it was my lunch! Words led to words and I hit him. Hell, he was just a little guy! Nobody’s going to talk to me the way he did.
Story 4: I was going to straighten up and show my family I could make it. I was ignorant of a lot of things I should have known about, like paying bills, getting a telephone, financing a car. My old lady was doing these things that I was supposed to be doing.
I was getting derogatory stuff from the neighbors. They look down on you if you’ve been in prison. You don’t need to hear it. You know it’s there.
We were at a party once. Being honest, I said, “We’re not married.” The whole room got quiet. I just stored that up for future reference.
You feel like a lop.
One day I was just sitting at the kitchen table looking at the potato pancakes we had to eat. I said to myself, fuck this, I’m going to go steal.
These men felt proud and strong when they were being criminal. When they were being responsible they felt lousy. In the language of psychology, all their reinforcers pointed them toward crime.
The group continued to meet in the prison for over a year. After several group members were released on parole, the group continued to meet for several weeks at one of their homes. Like several other examples in this chapter, we do not know that any of these men substantially changed their lives, let alone changed because of this group. We are relatively confident of the engagement and communication achieved between these offenders and the facilitator, and with the structure of authority the facilitator represented to these men at the time.
We revisit this group of “state-raised” convicts in Chapter 4, “Supportive Authority and the Strategy of Choices.”
Several offenders assigned to a residential treatment program were not performing well in treatment. They expressed resentment and defiance at being in treatment at all. All of them had high scores9 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
These men were brought together as a group to receive an abbreviated form of CSC. Several of these men already had some exposure to CSC, though none had completed a CSC program. The facilitator (JB) was confident that the objective (nonjudgmental), nonconfrontational methods of CSC – together with his own experience in working with hard-core offenders – would win their cooperation. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than he expected.
The facilitator attempted to explain to the group the basic concepts and methods of CSC, but they did not listen. Instead, they insisted that the facilitator listen to them. They told him how awful it was to be in the program and how unfairly they were treated. “You wouldn’t believe how they treat us around here,” was the common complaint, expressed in various ways by each of them. They all had examples of injustices and unfair demands made by the program staff. They described these injustices with enthusiasm. This was not a total surprise, of course, and the facilitator knew enough not to argue with them. He eventually convinced them to put aside their complaints, at least temporarily, and to let him explain what he intended for the group.
He described the steps of CSC and the idea of an objective thinking report. Then he proceeded to teach. The group indicated they understood what he was saying, but no one seemed very interested. When he asked for volunteers to present a thinking report, no one did. He eventually convinced them to comply, but they remained uninterested. Those group members who had previous experience in CSC were insulted when they were asked to do the elementary steps of a thinking report. “We already know that stuff,” one said.
During the third session of the group, a member who had no CSC experience presented a thinking report under the facilitator’s direction. At one point he digressed from objectively reporting his thoughts and began to justify them. Instead of reporting his thoughts and feelings, he was expressing them. The facilitator saw this as an opportunity to teach the idea of objective reporting. He interrupted the person’s report, turned to the group and asked, “Do you know why I interrupted this report?” He expected members who understood the process to say that the person was not reporting his thinking objectively and had started to justify his thinking instead. There was a long silence, then one man said, “Because you’re conceited and arrogant?”
This was a turning point for the facilitator and for the group. It obviously was not working. The facilitator stumbled through the session and thought long and hard about what to do. He made some new decisions and decided on a new strategy.
At the next session he made a fresh proposal to the group. He said he wanted to start over and would not proceed with the group unless everyone agreed on what we would do – on what they as group members were willing to do – in the group. He proposed these conditions:
That was the deal. The group’s response was positive and unanimous. They agreed to what the facilitator proposed, and from that day on every group session felt like a partnership of shared activity and shared interest. They simply left their adversarial stance behind.
The facilitator wrote the first question on the blackboard:
What was the thinking behind your past offending behaviors?
He asked if anyone thought they could answer that question just as it stands, without doing any thinking reports on specific situations or specific crimes. We discussed what this might mean: was there a single thought behind every one of a person’s offending behaviors?; or a single attitude?; or maybe there was one kind of thinking behind some of a person’s offending behaviors, and a different kind of thinking behind some others. This discussion led us to consider examples of “different ways of thinking” and eventually to the idea of “life-principles.”10
A group member with earlier CSC training said that, for him, there was clearly a single principle behind every rule-breaking behavior he ever did. This was, he said, “I do whatever I want.” Two other men quickly followed with similar answers. They thought they could identify a single thought or attitude behind their whole history of offending behavior. We agreed that the idea of “principles” or “life-principles” was a better term than “beliefs” or “attitudes” to capture the thinking that drove their offending behavior. Each member of the group saw himself as living his life according to a simple, basic idea, or at most a small cluster of ideas. They saw themselves as committed to these ideas “as a matter of principle.” Their personal life-principles, they said, gave a feeling of meaning and pride to their lives and to their actions. They (and the facilitator) were excited about this discovery. From this session onward, the terminology of “life-principle” dominated our discussions of their thinking, old and new. We still spoke from time to time of “thoughts,” “beliefs,” and “attitudes,” but the language of principles seemed to capture best what mattered most.
The next few sessions were devoted to identifying and discussing the principles behind their past offending behavior. They put their principles into words, and explained what these words meant to them. Group members asked questions and described how their own principles were similar to or different from the principles of others. Everyone was interested in learning about everyone else’s way of thinking. After three more sessions, everyone had identified life-principles that had personal meaning to them, and that they saw as standing behind their whole lifetime of offending behaviors. Some of these were very short and very simple. Others were more complicated. The only criteria were that the thinking they described seemed true and meaningful to them at the times they offended, and that this thinking explained, in their own minds, why they offended.
JAMES: I’m better than others. I have a right to do what I want. I want what I want and I’ll get it any way possible and I don’t care who I hurt.
KIRK: It’s all about me. I want what I want. It’s all about satisfaction. Whatever makes me happy.
KEVIN: If somebody does something to me, I have to even the score. Once a guy called the cops on me, and I burned his garage. I’m better than anyone else. My principle is: people are pawns. Use people to get what you can get out of them.
john: Rules are made to be broken. I can get around rules and laws if I try. I do what I want.DICK: I break two kinds of rules. Sometimes I’m pretty violent. My thinking then is, I treat people the way they treat me unless they cross some imaginary line, then I’m at liberty to react as severely as I choose. The imaginary line usually is, they put their hands on me. I get in a lot of fights and I try to leave them unconscious so I don’t need to be afraid of retaliation, at least not right then. Other rules I break have nothing to do with violence. I smoke a lot of marijuana, for instance. My thinking is, I’ll do what I want if it makes me feel good. Sometime I try to think differently, like “Honesty is the best policy.” It works for a while, but a situation always comes up when it doesn’t. Then my thinking is, “I can always weasel my way out of it.”
SAM: I can do as I please. Fuck ’em if they don’t like it. If I want something bad enough I can get it. I’ll do what it takes. If I’m mistreated I can mistreat others. If I’m done wrong to, I can mistreat others, even someone else that had nothing to do with it. Most of my crimes are like that.
The group came to an end without answering all three questions. Every member was able to think of new ways of thinking – new “personal principles” – that he could at least imagine himself living by. A few began testing these out in the real-life circumstances of their current incarceration. The final question, “How realistic is this new thinking for you personally, to use in real life?” was left open. (We describe the “new thinking” of one member of this group in Chapter 5, as part of our explanation of the four steps of Cognitive Self Change.)
As with the “state-raised” group of convicts, the quality of engagement and communication with the facilitator – and the authority he represented to them at the time – was an important achievement in itself, and these offenders had come to a point of considering change.
The limitation of the agreement between the facilitator and the group (no requirement, expectation, or assessment of change) did not render the process meaningless; it made it possible.
The reports that follow come from work with three offenders identified as gang affiliated. As part of this work these men talked about how they experienced themselves and their life situations.
James was a young adult offender serving a custodial sentence for a violent offense. He also had an extensive history of other assaults. He described his thoughts and feelings shortly before an offense in which he stabbed a member of a rival gang. James’ narrative starts when he and fellow gang members are sitting in a van listening to music.
Obviously I’m listening to the music, yeah, I’m listening to the beats getting hyped up, thinking, obviously these guys, they tried their thing … they done their thing, I done my thing before, but they got the last laugh. I’m thinking they got the last laugh. I don’t like that … because that makes me look like a dickhead then, if they got the last laugh. So I’m thinking, man’s go to hit them one more time … Man’s going to go there, beat them up and that.
James explained the importance of not being a dickhead:
To be a dickhead, like wouldn’t feel good. That’s the whole thing … Obviously that’s why I’ve got to set pace … because it’s about not being a dickhead, because when you are a dickhead, things can’t go right for you, because you’re a dickhead and people are going to violate you … and it’s going to get worse and that. It will always get worse. It can’t get any better… when you’re a dickhead it can’t get better. You’ve got to stand your ground and that. You either get beaten up, and you’re a man, or if you’re a dickhead that’s it. There’s a rap song I think it starts, “I’d rather die like a man than live like a bitch.”11 If you get violated by one person and someone else knows about it, you’ve got to show them that if anyone else tries it, it ain’t happening. You can’t let it run … You can’t run, because if you run once you are always going to run. People are always going to think, we could do that [to you]. So it’s not acceptable to be a dickhead.
Khaled was a young adult offender serving a custodial sentence for possession of a firearm with intent. He explained the importance of violence in his gang:
To gangs, actions speak louder than words. So certain things you’ve got to do that just tell these people that, just to tell your gang members I’m kind of crazy or I’m the kind of person you shouldn’t mess with … So obviously … if they are seeing it, then it puts fear into everyone … Say for example, someone walks in this door now and they say something to me which I don’t like, and I just pick up the chair and I start smashing their head with it, you look at me in a different way … You think, hold on this guy is sick. But really as a gang, if it was one of my gang people and I picked up this chair and done it in front of you, you’re thinking this guy is with the gangs, you don’t need to mess with him because you’ve seen him in action … That’s how you get to be the person, you just get your power. You just do certain things to show I’m a crazy one … You just love people to fear you.
Louis was a juvenile offender serving a custodial sentence for robbery and theft of a car. He had a range of previous convictions. He described how his experience of life before joining a gang led him to not care anymore and to commit himself to do anything to get what he wanted.
Obviously I got brothers so everything is played up, obviously my mum is a single mum. I got brothers, one of them is crazy [Louis’ brother had diagnosed mental health problems], at home and that, my [other] brother, he works 24/7 and there are times you see him struggle, and all these things around you, like obviously as you grow up, you know what’s happening around you, and you’re thinking why is that? This is not fair. Your brother, you are seeing him go mad, it’s embarrassing, your friends are seeing it, so it’s embarrassing, all of that stuff in your head and obviously you hold it in, well you get to a certain point where you think fuck you. What goes through your head is I can do anything I want, to be honest, I’ll do anything I want to get what I need.
Obviously there’s lots of police around. You’re getting, you’re getting harassed almost every other day, and that kind of hangs you up. That kind of gets you angry and pissed off sometimes. That makes you resist towards the police.
Basically, if you’ve got hope in your heart that means you want hope, isn’t it? When you lose hope you don’t really care about what you do anymore. I mean reckless. You don’t care about other people because no one else is helping you. You see it as, I’m out for myself, fuck the world.
Different kids around you look nicer than you, you’re wearing the same punk trainers from a year and a half ago, you get teased, and all these things build up inside you and everything around you is nice but you’re not, everything around you feels good and you don’t feel good. Everything around you is the same, everyone around you is thinking the same way as you and everyone’s temper is rising and everyone’s patience is rising to a point and then it just busts, you don’t care anymore, fuck it, I’ll do anything to get this, to get that, to get this, to get that.
Louis described looking at himself at this point as “untouchable” and as a “big man.”
Each offender described in this chapter presents unique challenges to treatment and the project of change. Their patterns of thinking and feeling are similar – sometimes strikingly so – but they are not identical. The differences are as important as the similarities.
These offenders represent different forms and degrees of barriers to communication, different patterns of resistance to treatment and change, and differences in the type and degree of change that is realistically achievable. Schizophrenic patients will be schizophrenic after even the best correctional treatment; “high scorers” may never experience meaningful empathy; the loyalties of gang members may prove more powerful than any alternative offered by treatment.
Our generalizations and conclusions are of a different order.
Our intent in presenting these examples is not to identify common patterns of cognition (instances of dysfunctional schemas, distortions, or thinking errors), but to display the relationship between each offender’s thoughts and feelings and that individual’s offending behavior. We focus on thoughts and feelings as they are experienced in the minds of individual offenders. This is our starting point. It is the basis of our understanding of offenders’ behavior, and offenders’ own starting point for change.
Every offending act makes sense – is permissible, justified, or even necessary – in the mind of the offender at the time he or she does it.
We also find another aspect of commonality in the kind of examples presented in this chapter. This lies in the roles offenders’ patterns of thinking and feeling play in the overall scope of their lives, and in their experience of their own identity as persons. That is the subject of the following chapter.