Criminal Personality

Chapter 1 A New Horizon for Total Change of the Criminal
Chapter 2 A History of Criminal Rehabilitation
Chapter 3 First Contacts with the Criminal
Chapter 4 Choice and Will
Chapter 5 The Phenomenologic Approach in a Program for Basic Change of the Criminal
Chapter 6 The Group Format
Chapter 7 Correctives for Automatic Errors of Thinking
Chapter 8 Correction of Other Thinking Errors
Chapter 9 The Process of Deterrence
Chapter 10 Experiences During the Change Process
Chapter 11 Criminal Patterns in Confinement
Chapter 12 The Personality of the Agent of Change
Chapter 13 A Recommendation for a Rehabilitation Program

The basic defect of traditional treatment systems is the persisting concept that criminals think and reason as non-criminals do and that they, therefore, respond similarly to both reasoning and love. Yochelson and Samenow have definitely profiled the characteristics of the errors of criminal thinking, together with their derivatives-feeling and behavior. They show persuasively that because of ingrained and pervasive errors of thinking, criminals live and act in a world with entirely different assumptive bases than those of non-criminals. The authors then proceed to develop a treatment program using a phenomenological process. This exhaustive and painstaking study marks a turning point in the history of efforts to rehabilitate criminals.
The Criminal Personality is important reading for you. It is an often devastating book that is uncompromising in its refection of conventional wisdom in the field of criminal psychology. It rejects the concept of the criminal as biopsychosocial victim, and in its place formulates an accountability theory based on the premise that criminals freely choose and prefer lives of crime.
The Criminal Personality is a seminal work that provides challenge to mental health professionals to alter their preconceptions in dealing with criminals, and gives correctional counselors a blueprint to begin the serious work of criminal rehabilitation. One by one the cherished myths of sociology and psychology regarding the origins of criminality are discarded, since the authors find that rationalizations of broken family, racial oppression, bad companions, and lack opportunity' are utilized by criminals to justify continued nonresponsibility for their own behavior.