men sent to us are criminals

with what you might call aggravated emotional disturbances."

"Isn't the criminal mind always sick?" Feigen was asked.

"Yeah, I suppose so. But we get the worst ones. This is the last stop before Mental Hygiene takes over."

In examining the case histories of Vacaville's inmates, a number of consistencies become apparent. Every one of them turned to criminal behavior to satisfy a desperate "ego hunger."

"I never could feel much like a man," a husky, 39year-old parole applicant confided. "I wanted to be important to feel that I'm just as good as the next guy, or maybe better."

"Stealing made you feel more like a man, didn't it?” Lester prodded.

The prisoner nodded. From Religious Family This inmate, who came from a fanatically religious family, has an arrest record dating back to 1931. His crimes include juvenile, truancy, auto theft, forgery, drunkenness, burglary, child molesting, escape and attack. Of him the psychiatrists said:

"He has many severe personality problems and many of the features of the psychopathic offender. He is unlikely to gain very much benefit from the present confinement except that his confinement will delay his next offenses."

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For the present, parole for this man was denied.

Doctors studying criminal minds know the male ego is a complex and curious thing. It is the drive behind all the accomplishments of men since the dawn of history.

Failures in Society Those who can't satisfy this drive through legitimate channels will often turn to crime. Others will seek escape, or courage, in alcohol or narcotics.

"The criminal is essentially a failure in normal society." Lester pointed out. "And failure is pretty tough to accept."

Walter W. Stone, chief of the division of adult paroles, noted that as the pace of modern society grows faster and increasingly demanding, there will be more and more men who can't keep up with it. More failures.

A 22-year-old inmate from Los Angeles, committed for robbery and participating with others in the attack of a girl, put it this way:

"You look around and you see guys with good houses and good jobs and women and good clothes and cars and like that. Man, you look at yourself and you know you ain't makin' it. You're a nothin'. What you gonna do? Nobody wants to be a nothin'."

Hungry for Acceptance A pleasant, freckle faced convict eased himself into the interview chair and added a variation to the pattern.

Imprisoned for five counts of burglary with a prior conviction for assault with a

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deadly weapon, freckle-face is classified in prison as a passive homosexual.

"He exhibits a willingness to go to any extreme to gain acceptance, if only in the security of an institutional environment," the report on him stated.

From talking with thousands of convicts and reading their psychoanalyses, the Adult Authority has discovered that sex deviation is sometimes expressed in crimes other than sex offenses.

The attacker who achieves "masculine superiority" by forcibly taking a woman, the child molester and the exhibitionist are obvious sex offenders.

Crimes Ease Tensions

The burglar is not, although the files are filled with case histories of housebreakers who experienced some sort of Freudian gratification by their act.

The same is true of arson, as illustrated by this 21-year-¦ old barn burner who admitted setting "800 fires, maybe more" in the forests of Siskiyou County.

"I would get nervous and all tensed up inside," he recalled. "After I set a fire I felt OK again."

This youth, termed a "classic example of the pyromaniac," must be watched constantly by prison guards to make sure he doesn't get near matches or any other -means of starting a fire.

"He can't help himself," explained Dr. Ray Kellogg, a prison psychiatrist. "You could lock him up in solitary for two years, but it wouldn't change his sex drive."

"Talking Out' Process

How does the prison program change the sex drives of men who set fires or molest children?

"First," said Dr. Kellogg, "we try to get them to understand why they're the way they are, accept it, and talk freely about it. The trouble is, many of them simply don't have the intelligence to grasp it." out" procThe "talking it out” ess is carried on among the inmates themselves in supervised

sessions known as group therapy. Those with similar mental disorders are encouraged to excuange complexes in an application of the misery-loves-company theory.

Sex Offenders Bullied For one thing, it helps remove the stigma attached to sex offenses. Such criminals ordinarily occupy the lowest strata of prison society.

When he was in the Couny Jail, one child molester now in Vacaville had to be segregated for his own safety because other prisoners bullied and beat him. Now he is exposed only to others like himself.

Most doctors have rejected the notion that emasculation by surgery suppresses sexual desire.

"The drive originates in the brain," Kellogg declared.

Brainwashing the men of Vacaville to the point where they will no longer be a menace to others is the monumental task facing Dr. King and his staff of 13 psychiatrists and psychologists.

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