ABSTRACT
In 1970, two years after receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, the author joined Samuel Yochelson, a psychiatrist and psychologist, in his Program for the Investigation of Criminal Behavior located in Washington, DC, at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Dr. Yochelson already had been working for nine years to understand the mental makeup of offenders and to develop a program that would help the participants become responsible adults. The findings of the study were highly controversial, largely because they ran counter to pervasive thinking in the United States about the causes of crime. For decades, a deterministic view held sway. If one looks at what Dr. Yochelson did, his work is comparable to what Sigmund Freud accomplished with neurotic patients. Freud had no experimental design. He did not operate by a strict scientific method complete with carefully formulated hypotheses and a control group.
