Pre-Offense Operational Restraint (POOR): Prophecy Fulfilled!

Twenty-two years ago in a workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina, I said with all the sincerity and frevor I could muster: "The farreaching implications of lethal injections include daily executions, even multiple-event deaths (simultaneous executions in the same death chamber) if we do not stem the tide of crime, violence and incarceration in this country. Only those who do crime can prevent this impending crisis!

In December, 2007, we will recognize the 25th anniversary of this method of execution, following its introduction in Texas in December 1992 when Charles Brooks, Jr. became the first criminal killed this way. To date more than 200 men and women have been executed, using lethal injection. Texas, with 19 executions this month--July 2007--is almost on a "daily death" roll.

I had been out of prison 17 years that day in 1985 and for more than 10 years had been conducting a series of workshops for a NC Department of Correction initiative called the Pre-Release Training, (PRT). In this day-long workshop, part of a multi-week session in which speakers and others tried to show criminals within 90 days of their release how to stay out, I shared with the men what I was learning about why I did crime, how to stop doing crime, and how to move progressively to becoming a contributing member of society.

I noticed as I monitored the data that more and more criminals were being incarcerated! More and more prisons, including those in North Carolina, struggled with overcrowded conditions, and violence raged throughout the nation. Because I also delivered workshops for correctional professionals, including probation officers and educational program specialists, to name just two, I witnessed the growing range of frustration. Some of them confided in me how frustrating it was to work so hard to get criminals prepared for release and to see them return almost before the gates shut behind them.

I knew that these hardworking professionals had, not only a thankless task, but an impossible one as well because they struggled to encourage behavioral change without cognitive conversion. That task is pyschologically impossible. Remember, I define crime as a way of thinking that justifies harming others for self-gratification.

The change continuum, as I have proved in the 39 years I've moved along it, follows these steps: change your thinking because when you do, you can change your beliefs and when you do you can change your expectations, and when you do, you can change your attitude, and when you do, you can change your behavior, and when you do, you can change your performance, which lead to change in outcomes. This process produces a new destiny.

Despite significant decreases in crime rates, prison populations continue to grow, and violence escalates. Today, more than two million people live in the nation's state and federal prisons. More than 600,000 of them leave those prisons annually, and more than 75 percent of those released each year return to prison within three years.

The nation grows weary of the crime, prison cycle!

Therefore, as we countdown to the 25th anniversary of lethal injections, I predict that unless the FLOC (Families and Loved Ones of Criminals), teaming with other stakeholders, launch a national initiative to teach and train huge numbers of criminals to transition from crime to contribution, our muddled responses to crime will get worse. Given the potential confluence of horrendous violence, often led by maurading gangs of young criminals, escalating prison populations that drive crime response costs ever upwards, with ever more sophisticated technology, particularly modeling software, I believe we are not far from incarcerating certain criminals without the cost of convicting them! (ICC-CC)!

I believe that within the next 15 years unless the FLOC becomes an effective NFLOC and succeeds in reducing recidivism by at least 50 percent, crime weary citizens, most of them victims, will give into a technology-driven so-called "crime prevention" initiative that will use personal and legal data about individual criminals to provide probable pre-cursors of re-offending.

Don't laugh! Search the literature and see the prevalence of the idea that "sex offenders will re-offend." A 2005 report from the Association for the Treament of Sexual Abusers said frankly: "Sexual offending, like many mental and medical conditions, cannot be cured. Contemporary cognitive behavioral treatment, however, helps offenders learn to control their behavior . . ." Another report, this one published in 2004 by the Pennslyvania Department of Corrections, said: "Research on the most effective methods of treatment for sex offenders is still in the very early stages of development. Existing studies on the efficacy of sex offender treatment has been plagued by methodological weaknesses and are therefore largely inconclusive . . .While no evidence currently exists to definitively favor one treatment approach over another for sex offenders, several emerging principles should be considered when treating sex offenders . . .The fourth principle of sex offender treatment is that remaining in treatment is absolutely crucial. Meta-analyses have demonstrated that sex offenders who drop out of treatment, regardless of the type of treatment received, not only have higher recidivism rates than those who complete treatment but also have higher recidivism rates than those who never even received treatment. Dropping out of treatment is recognized as one of the strongest single predictors of sexual recidivism (Hanson and Bussiere, 1998)." You see, we are just a step away from society condoning the incarceration of sex offense treatment dropouts without conviction.

Do you see the begin of modeling?

How far are we from a study to determine the implications and impact of post-release "treatment" on violent criminals? In a Radio America essay, published almost exactly seven years ago, Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis said: "Most specialists in criminology believe in counseling and therapy to set ex-cons right. But psychologist Stanton Samenow, author of Straight Talk About Criminals, says it doesn't work, because it starts with the premise that criminals are hapless victims of circumstance. He argues they can't be rehabilitated to something they never were."

Like, it or not, we are heading down a collective cognitive pathway that leads to where we never thought we would go-- the belief that some criminals are so crime-addicted that they can be presumed guilty before they commit a specific crime.

Unlikely, you say! Impossible, you believe! Well, how many of you would have believed me 22 years ago when I said with all the sincerity and fervor I could muster: ""The farreaching implications of lethal injections include daily executions, even multiple-event deaths if we do not stem the tide of crime, violence and incarceration in this country!"

I believe that's where we're headed! Just as surely as we have arrived at almost daily executions in Texas, it won't be long before California and other states with large numbers of death row inmates follow suit. Remember, we have already arrived at the acceptance of the "habitual" offender concept, and "mandatory minimums." Finally, if post-release supervision, not probation, but the power to require continued supervision after a criminal has served his or her sentence, is acceptable, and it is, how much must we stretch to get to Pre-Offense Operational Restraint (POOR)?

Attention FLOC! You might be the only ones who can "stand in the gap," and reverse this trend! Let me hear from you!