The Criminal Personality

The Change Process

By (author) Samuel Yochelson, Stanton Samenow

Publication date:

07 July 1977

Length of book:

592 pages

Publisher

Jason Aronson, Inc.

ISBN-13: 9780876687710

This is the second of a three volume landmark study of the criminal mind. This book describes an intensive therapeutic approach designed to completely change the criminals way of thinking. The authors reject traditional treatment approaches as reinforcing of the criminals sense of being a victim of society. Rather Yochelson and Samenow stress that the criminal must make a choice to give up criminal thinking and learn morality. A Jason Aronson Book

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

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 noncriminals. The authors then proceed to develop a treatment program using a phenomenological approach. This exhaustive and painstaking study marks a turning point in the history of efforts to rehabilitate criminals.