Basic Premises
Two pioneers in the study of criminal behavior have undoubtedly done more than anyone to identify what the criminal’s basic premises are. Doctor Samuel Yochelson, M.D., Ph.D. and Doctor Stanton E. Samenow, Ph.D. (hereinafter often referred to simply as “the Doctors”) spent more than a decade and a half conducting a clinical study into the nature of the criminal personality. What they uncovered is nothing less than a veritable blueprint outlining how criminals generally think.
The study began in 1961 when Doctor Yochelson became the director of the Program for the Investigation of Criminal Behavior at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a massive federal facility in Washington, D.C. that houses the criminally insane. Doctor Yochelson agreed
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They noticed that the criminals would use the “insights” gained in therapy groups as further justifications for their behavior. Rather than providing the criminal offenders with valuable pieces of the puzzle, the Doctors were giving them further rationalizations for their crimes. The criminals were gaining a whole new vocabulary with which to excuse their conduct and manipulate others. The Doctors eventually concluded that the approaches that worked well with non-criminals were inapplicable to this difficult …show more content…
The following day the Doctors would examine what the offenders had written and subject the offenders’ thinking to correctives. Using this method, the Doctors were able to identify a host of thinking errors the offenders had in common. Regardless of the types of crimes each had committed, the Doctors noted the subject offenders were effectively “carbon copies of one another” in terms of how they viewed “themselves and the world.”
The Doctors eventually called these erroneous thought patterns, appropriately enough, “criminal thinking errors” and concluded that if the criminal is to achieve real and lasting reform, it is his thinking that must change. After all, whatever the ultimate “cause” of crime might be, the proximate cause is always the way the individual criminal thinks, how he interprets and processes information, what he elects to acknowledge or ignore. And since many of these thinking errors constitute the criminal’s basic premises, working to correct them impacts many areas of his life, not just how he operates in