...all the rehabilitation programs in the world will be of no use unless the criminal changes his thinking. Everything we do is preceded, accompanied, and followed by thinking! The criminal must learn to identify and then abandon, thinking patterns that have guided his behavior for years. He must be taught new thinking patterns that are self-evident and automatic for responsible people but are totally foreign to him. Short of this occurring, he will continue to commit crimes.
In Chapter two, Samenow writes about some basic myths about criminals.
We, the public, may be so revolted by the gruesomeness of a crime that we conclude only a sick person would be capable of such an act. A detailed and lengthy examination of the mind of a criminal (which is seldom made) will reveal that it is anything but sick. The criminal is rational, calculating, and deliberate in his actions.
He is also not a hapless victim of oppressive social conditions. ...They seize on any hardships in their lives, real or made up, to justify their acts against society. By portraying themselves as victims, they seek sympathy and hope to absolve themselves of culpability. ...In their accounts, they relate only what others did to them, omitting what they did to make a bad situation even worse.
As a child, the criminal shuts his parents out of his life because he doesn't want them or anyone else to know what he is up to. No matter how hard they try, mothers and fathers cannot penetrate the secrecy, and they discover that they do not know their own child. He is the kid who remains the family mystery.
...Despite a multitude of differences in their backgrounds and crime patterns, criminals are alike in one way: how they think. All regard the world as a chessboard over which they have total control, and they perceive people as pawns to be pushed around at will.
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