On Being Ruled By A Prison Population

Ace of Spades HQ: "In the prison thread of a couple of days ago, longtime moron 'Seamus Muldoon' recommended the book Inside the Criminal Mind by Stanton Samenow, who, Seamus says, "is not a big fan of rehabilitation", and argues that is very difficult to get a criminal to change the basic way of thinking that makes them who they are:

The evolution of the criminal mind starts with learning patterns of manipulation early in life that enable him to negotiate the real world without consequences. The thought process becomes twisted into a sense of entitlement and distorted "self logic" and a belief that the rules others live by don't apply to him. At some point, the budding criminal makes a conscious decision to behave the way he does, as opposed to being shaped by outside forces

This lines up pretty much with the observations of ex-prison chaplain Peter Grant, in his book Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls I mentioned on a book thread of two or three months ago. Grant says that true, long-lasting rehabilitations are few and far between: possible, but not very likely. In his book, he talks about his one successful case, and it took months and months of therapy and prayer to get the guy to understand some real basic truths, namely, that 1. what he did was wrong and 2. it's nobody's fault but his. Normal people learn this sort of thing early on, in childhood, but with some, the crucial lessons never seem to sink in.

So take a whole carload of these near-sociopaths (and actual sociopaths), all of whom are extraordinarily self-fixated, amoral experts at manipulation, put them in close quarters for an extended period of time, and the results are horrific. This is why prisons are dangerous, scary places, and why the recidivism rates are sky high."

Wait ... what? Can someone explain to me the difference in psyche between a prison population and our rulers in Mordor on the Potomac?

I have many times argued that the solution to the survival of the country is to build a guarded fence around D.C. ... with the barbed wire and guard towers facing inwards.

UPDATE: Of course I had to publish before I included Mark Twain: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar". There is nothing new under the sun -- it's just that the evidence keeps getting deeper and deeper to the point of literally drowning us.