A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

of the key concepts of Christianity. In the case of Panzram, it is easy to see what he means.
Panzram loathed himself, and said so repeatedly. Yet his autobiography reveals that he was a man
of considerable intelligence and integrity, and that these were his ‘essential’ attributes. If Panzram
had recognised this, he would never have become a criminal. Even as a criminal, his intelligence
would almost certainly have responded to this recognition that he had good reason to love his
‘naphsha’ and should not be ashamed to do so.
MacDougald obtained permission to try out these ideas in the Georgia State Penitentiary at
Reidsville. He started from the assumption that prisoners are intelligent enough to grasp the lesson
of Bruner’s experiment with the cat: that they are somehow refusing to see and hear certain things.
It is a law of nature that each person seeks to achieve his own goals. The trouble with the criminal
is that his faulty attitudes cause him to pursue these goals in such a muddled way that he never
achieves them. As we have seen in the case of Haigh, the criminal’s ‘cleverness’ is usually a form
of stupidity. The criminal’s chief problem is that, like the alcoholic, he feels helpless; nothing ever
comes out right. He blames ‘life’. MacDougald set out to show criminals that the real blame lay in
their own muddle and confusion, their negative attitudes.
The results were spectacular. Initial tests at the Georgia Institute of Correction showed that sixtythree
per cent of prisoners - many of them ‘hard core psychopaths’ (i.e., Panzram-types) - could be
rehabilitated in a matter of weeks. Follow-up studies eighteen months later showed that there had
been no backsliding. The instructors from MacDougald’s institute (which at that stage was called
the Yonan Codex Foundation, the name being that of the Aramaic version of the New Testament
MacDougald preferred) began by instructing two prisoners in their methods for two weeks, and
then the four of them instructed another twenty-two prisoners, four of whom were also chosen as
instructors. Later the course was renamed Emotional Maturity Instruction.
MacDougald offers one remarkable illustration of the way it worked. One prisoner felt intense
hostility towards another. Prison morality - as expounded by Jack Abbott - dictates that in a
situation like this honour demands that the two of them fight it out, and that if one can kill the
other, he does so. The man had concealed a piece of iron pipe in preparation for the showdown; but
after a discussion and exploration of the meaning of the concept of forgiveness, this suddenly
struck him as absurd. The man was his ‘neighbour’, and his own distorted concepts were urging
him to an act that was basically against his own interests. So he bought the other man a sandwich
and a coffee and talked the thing over. The two became friends.
At first sight, it looks as if MacDougald had simply found a way of importing old-fashioned
evangelism into the prison, but closer examination shows that to presume this is to miss the point.
His basic assumption was that most criminals are acting at a level far below their natural capacity
and potential. All men have the same need to grow up, to evolve, to achieve their objectives. By
treating them as intelligent human beings, by offering them the possibility of some kind of
evolution, MacDougald had changed their basic attitudes. In fact, his discovery had been
anticipated two decades before by a Hungarian named Alfred Reynolds, who had left Hungary in
the 1930s and came to live in England. Reynolds was in Army Intelligence during the war, and in
1945 was given the almost impossible task of ‘de-Nazifying’ young Nazi officers who had been
captured. Reynolds has described how, when he first entered the room, there was an atmosphere of
cold hostility. They stared at him, prepared - like Bruner’s cat - to ‘cut out’ anything he had to say
at the level of the ear-drum. To their surprise, there was no homily on the evils of Nazism. Instead,
he asked them to explain to him what they understood by National Socialism. Once they were