Contrasted with the horribly malevolent, deadly and mysterious outburst of Brian and Nicholaus, our four ‘John Does’ seem almost transparent. For 16 year-old Brian Bassett was it the sociological explanation of the "bad crowd" that we should explore to make sense of the act, or was it the case of the influence of a biological "bad seed"? Or do we look instead to the pressures on the modern family as a means of putting this case to rest? Or, did something go awry in the way that Brian and his friend came to "see" and "understand" the world around them, their family and their selves? Likewise for the Garrison sisters and Allen Goul - are these simply demon-children or has some catastrophe, gradual or sudden, occurred in this family that has driven them to murder most foul? And even if there was such a catastrophe in that family, surely there were other possible responses. Why were they not pursued by these young people?

Marvin Tom remembers nothing of his mother, except her funeral. He was age five when she died of an overdose in Oakalla Prison. Because she drank heavily during pregnancy, Tom, at age 30, is intellectually impaired. He’s also a chronic alcoholic. Tom does have memories of his father - all of them horrific. His father was a drunken brute who regularly kicked, burned and beat his young son. Mercifully, the child was taken into care by social services and spent his formative years in a series of foster homes. Former teacher Norma Smith, who taught Tom when he was a teenager.said he functioned at about the Grade 3 level. He was placed among special needs children. By age 15, he was an alcoholic. His brushes with the law included car theft and being unlawfully in a building...Tom was placed on probation but he was uncooperative with probation officers and social workers...During the next few years, as his alcohol problem increased, Tom fathered three children by three different women. In 1989, he unaccountably attacked one of the women with a knife.

Sentenced to four years, he was twice released on parole, but each time returned to jail for violations involving the use of alcohol...In 1993, having completed his four-year sentence, Tom was released from prison. Within days of his release, Tom committed the brutal sex-slaying of L.____, 24. The next day he attacked two other women. Although tried for first degree murder...a jury decided the evidence of Tom’s drunkenness at the time reduced the offence to manslaughter.

During the hearing (to have Tom declared a dangerous offender and given an indeterminate sentence) Crown counsel told the court she intends to prove Tom has established a pattern of persistent aggressiveness [and that] his low intellectual capacity, coupled with his chronic alcoholism, suggest he won’t respond to treatment."

And poor Marvin Tom, a victim of alcoholism and, no doubt, racism as well as a life of poverty and mental disadvantage - how do we consider his deviance? Escaping from our world via alcohol, his subsequent actions-in-that-world were horrific, both to himself and others and were matched in spirit if not in substance by actions done to him by family and society. Is prison the appropriate home for the untreatable but dangerous victim? Is it the best we can do? And if we suppose that the offender’s actions are deeply rooted in culture and psychology, what are the deeper origins of society’s bureaucratic response to those actions and to what extent are they revealed in modern correctional practice?

He is doing 8 years, having served 6 months. Conviction charge: Trafficking in Narcotics and Theft. Prognosis: Measured. Liabilities: He has been part of the criminal culture for a number of years and has been quite successful. His contact with the regular community is criminal. Assets: He is willing to upgrade and look at career options.

Educationally he finished Grade 12 (GED) within the academic program without any apparent difficulties. His present plans are to upgrade and develop career options from that perspective.

Occupationally, he considers himself the business type, as he speaks of sales experience. Manual labor is not how he perceives employment. He enjoys relating to people, specifically in the persuasive level (business). At the same time, the prestige element ranks very high in him. Jobs in the business world must provide visible esteem otherwise he will not function at his best. If esteem is present or in sight, he will be a very aggressive worker. He is an entrepreneur.

On Sept. 10 at approximately 12:20 PM I was confronted by Mr. G___ in the prison courtyard. He came up to me and threatened to gouge my eyes out and kill me upon his release from prison. He stated that he would find me and carry out the action. This is not the first time that he has acted in a threatening manner. Previous threats were made in June and July inside the school. Those threats came in response to me trying to solve some behaviour problems that. Mr. G.____ displayed. My response to Mr. G.____’s threat was to walk away. I do, however, take his threats seriously and I feel very cautious when approached by him.

As far as I can ascertain, his threats stem from his previous involvement in the school program. Due to his aggressive behaviour and disruptions while a student, I found it necessary to ban and suspend him from the school and the program. He appears to be very unpredictable and acts in a very aggressive manner whenever he approaches myself and other instructors.

The immediate solution appears to be simply to avoid Mr. G____, though that is not always possible within the confines of this institution. We are concerned about his potential violence while he is in prison and also upon his release. We don’t relish the idea of being targets for his anger.

On examination, Mr. A.____ presented as an attractive and extremely articulate man...He most definitely does not present as the stereotype of the prison inmate....Previous psychological testing indicated that he functions in the very superior range of intellectual ability.

Both of the previous assessments concluded that Mr. A.___ met the criteria for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, that condition previously known as psychopathy.....Mr. A.___ maintains that he has changed from the man described in the earlier assessments. The credibility of this claim is in my judgment central to an assessment of the risk this man represents to the public....

Such is not always the case, as in instances where crimes are motivated by economic necessity. Here, however, the likelihood of recidivism depends on the degree to which one believes that the previously diagnosed psychopathic personality has changed. While there is some evidence to suggest something of an improvement in recent years..there is unfortunately evidence that key elements of the psychopathic personality structure remain. In particular, there is a lack of affective tone when discussing the plight of others...This lack of empathy is in my judgment a significant indicator that whatever progress Mr. A has made in accepting responsibility for his actions, his fundamental personality remains psychopathic, and as such he continues to pose a risk to society. If released, I think that he might do well as long as things continued to go his way, as well they might given his extraordinary intellectual prowess. In the face of frustrating obstacles, however, it is my opinion that Mr. A___ would continue to be ruthlessly self-serving, and I can not therefore reassure the Parole Board as to his safety in the community.

Once in prison, is the kind of objectification that J___D.___ experiences an example of our ‘making sense’ of the criminal and prescribing a cure? And Mr. G___ who, in the face of disappointment threatens to gouge out the eyes of his perceived persecutor, is this Brian Bassett grown up, with violent assertion no longer uncontrollably explosive, but measured and owned as a social tactic? And finally, Mr. A____, whose criminal path is not escapist, not a response to poverty, discrimination, or low self-esteem, and not an alternative means of employment, but rather is an informed choice - what to do with him in our need to understand? Mr. A____ emerges as the ‘purest deviant’, the errant self driven not by demons or devils as in an earlier age but by deep, internal mental structures that seem to amount to much the same thing in their quality of mystification.

What can one make of all this? In a culture built on assumptions of enlightenment one is more often than not persuaded that it is possible and important to 'make sense' of phenomena, especially when they may in some way be either beneficial or harmful to ourselves, other humans, or existence per se. Thus our ancestors sought to understand seasons, tides and social deviance and we seek to understand earthquakes, sunspots and social deviance. How can we, then, make sense of a range of deviant human behaviours such as those outlined above? Indeed, is 'deviance' the right lens through which to see and understand them? How do we draw a distinction between J.D.’s entreprenurial drive and need for status and the same qualities in the ‘respectable’ achieving citizen? Are there really correct or "true" ways of being a citizen of a community that are qualitatively superior? Or must we accept the post-modern frame that questions the question and the possibility of any "true" answer - of any one answer being necessarily, absolutely better than another? Or, avoiding such a duality, can we through social consensus agree at least on a ranking of human behaviours that would include doubts as well as proscriptions?

All these individuals, actions, aberrations and more are collapsed in modern parlance under the term ‘deviance’ - a classically modern notion, a product of beliefs that were born in the 17th century age of rationalism and science and that came to political fruition in the 18th century Enlightenment, the application of the new science to human problems and thus the true 'dawn of the modern era'. In Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975), a pre-modern Russian village can be the site of a "town fool’s convention" and nothing is awry - in modern Soviet Russia as in all modern systems, the town fools were sent away for cures - sometimes forever. Criminology, like psychiatry, is an archetypal Enlightenment product, an attempt to apply science (it is, after all, a social science) to understanding a phenomenon in order to intervene and thereby control or eradicate it - much the same as modern medicine has its origins in struggles against diseases such as smallpox. And just as the medical establishment has used its claims of beneficence to expand its field of operation, so has criminology managed to extend dramatically the field of behaviours designated as deviant and subject to cure. Michel Foucault argued that criminology in its modernist hubris has pushed the envelope of exploration beyond the act/crime itself, to the "shadows behind the act". Thus

aggessivity is punished along with acts of aggression - rape is punished but also perversions - murders are punished but also drives and desires. The central issue here is not the punishing, but rather the core belief the aggression, perversion, and desire can be located within the human soul/personality/mind – depending of the theology or theory of the approach – and subsequently repaired or excised. More skeptical moderns insist that such quests yield only shadows and never the prey.

The behaviours we now characterize as "deviant" are hardly new - theft, murder, drug use and sexual aberration being constants in human affairs. For much of Western history, however, they were considered almost mundane in nature, controlled or deterred through random if brutal punishments, banishment, or execution. Given a sensual world doomed to imperfection, these behaviours were inevitable, indeed they were welcome proof of that very imperfection. The idea of a "cure", or even the need to "understand" was reserved for heresy, a crime of the spirit or the mind. With the coming of a modern and increasingly secular world view by the 18th century these two sets of behaviours change places and the mundane becomes criminal or deviant and in need of correcting while deviance in the realm of the spirit or mind is either allowed free rein or reclassified from crime to illness.

Deviance is far too complex and morally ambiguous, however, to allow for any singular modern understanding. While any number of philosophic traditions in Western culture can be illustrative of these modern understandings of deviance, a particularly useful entry point may be the positions of three French 18th century writers, creatures of the Enlightenment all, who give us a choice of modern lenses through which to view human deviance:

Voltaire (1694-1778), the senior of the three, embodied the more conservative, almost pre-modern view, suggesting that we should view the phenomena as a whole, deviance and crime being simply reflective of 'human nature' - these are the kinds of things that humans do and while it would be foolish to assume (as does Candide’s companion Dr. Pangloss) that these behaviours are perverse proof that ours is a 'best of all possible worlds', it would be equally foolish to undertake attempts at systemic or spiritual reform. That said, Voltaire in the classic tradition of the modern liberal crusader for the rights of the individual, spent his life struggling to support individual victims of injustice, punish specific offenders, and right specific wrongs. Modern Voltaireans acknowledge that the world is an unjust place and that injustice, which bears hardest on the poor, will lead inevitably to crime and deviance which must be punished if overall order is to be maintained. Here, even in the face of evil of holocaust proportions, deviance remains merely "banal" and can only be mediated by individual actions. The task, therefore, is to focus on justice, on the righting of wrongs, on moderating punishment and pursuing those who by their actions add to the intrinsic pains of existence. At the end of Voltaire’s Candide the characters who have endured countless privations, brutalities, and injustices are counseled that the best response is to ‘tend to their own garden’ rather than launch a crusade, and in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the greatest deviance of the 20th century, the most heroic figure is Sgt. Anton Schmidt, a German soldier who for five months of the War quietly and for no reward assisted Jewish refugees and was just as quietly executed as a result.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), in a sense responding to Voltaire, assumed the opposite position, insisting that deviance is abhorrent and contrary to an essentially "good" human nature and that reform of selves is possible via a combination of personal reflection and reform of society and its institutions. By agreements freely entered into (social contracts) the injustices and pains of existence can be, if not eliminated, certainly made tolerable and deliberate deviance outlawed. This 'social' side of the Rousseauist position was complemented by the psychological perspective that education coupled with introspection can lead to self-understanding and thereby to the desire to live equitably and humanely with humans and nature. This tripartite plan for humane existence (contract+education+ introspection) was designed by Rousseau for operation in small, egalitarian and agrarian communities, but modern 'Rousseaueans' have left that caveat behind and seized upon the optimistic (some would say utopian) message that deviance can be eliminated by (a) education; (b) agreement; (c) reflection or (d) if all else fails, exile or execution. This tolerance for the idea that it might be necessary to sometimes ‘force one to be free’ enables us to locate Rousseauean roots in both liberal and authoritarian attempts to ‘bring forth a better world’.

Finally the last of our trio, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), took a position that may enjoy more current popularity, namely that deviance is inherent in all, embedded in human nature, and that this should be 'appreciated' rather than denied or abhorred. If Voltaire was the practical 'realist' and Rousseau the naive utopian, then deSade represents the celebratory 'dualist'. Love and Hate, Good and Bad, Beast and Man are inextricably unitary and we can only know the one through the other. To deny or repress deviance or the 'other' is simply to invite illness or pathology. Individuals and societies must acknowledge deviance, 'validate' it to use the modern jargon, and by doing so keep it within the bounds of the tolerable. Modern skepticism about the potential of the criminological or penal solutions to deviance and accompanying calls to 'legalize' or 'decriminalize' many behaviours find a home in the Sadean tradition as do many so-called 'perverse' celebrations of what others perceive as deviance.

Since each of these perspectives, these lenses through which we see and understand what is before us, is part of the modern repertoire one can reasonably approach the issue of crime and punishment through any or all of them. Viewing crime and punishment through the Voltairean lens would see us focusing on issues of justice and injustice, the folly of attempts at universal reformation, the futility of mandating behaviours, and the insidious corruption that lay at the heart of all bureaucratic systems - political, economic or social - and the inevitability of individuals falling victim to such systems and the corresponding necessity of struggling for justice on behalf of those individuals. The field of crime, criminal justice and prisons is particularly ripe for Voltairean pickings.

The Rousseauean lens, on the other hand, would see us examining the various attempts to bring about change in individuals and justice in societies. At the political level, great societies, just societies, new deals and fair deals are all Rousseauean in origin if not in substance while in our prisons education programs, therapy and counseling, token economies and just communities are Russeauean in their social dimension. The Rousseauean lens retains much of the social perspective stemming from a Voltairean view, but is at the same time microscopic in its search for the origin of both illness and cure within the self. Until the era of post-modern doubt, this was the most prominent lens through which one conceptualized crime and punishment - indeed most professionals in corrections remain stubborn adherents to the Rousseauean view (though few would identify it as such).

Finally, the Sadean lens prefers to train its eye on the extravagant and bizarre, preferring Hannibal Lector to the petty thief, the 'Butcher of Buchenwald' to Adolf Eichmann, Ted Bundy to the neighborhood flasher. In an age of increasing cynicism, alienation and relativism, this is currently the most popular lens through which to view crime and punishment - indeed the popular media is awash in a sea of Sadean images and the post-modernists in our universities celebrate "difference" in order to denigrate the universal, the homogenous, the banal.

This book takes up the methodology if not the ideology of the Rousseauean position, examining the 'modern reformational project' within the prison. In doing so the focus is not on the most bizarre crimes or the most unjust penalties, but on persons whose acts have been labeled deviant but who are nonetheless familiar to us, people we can recognize most clearly, perhaps even empathize with. The claim here is that the 'critical distance' needed to achieve some measure of disinterested understanding can be attained without restricting the phenomena to be studied to its extreme manifestations. As a form of human behaviour, criminal activity per se is distant enough from the everyday lives of most citizens for such a perspective to be attainable. Hence like Hannah Arendt’s decision to focus on Adolf Eichmann in her effort to ‘understand’ fascism, attention is paid here to the 'uncomfortably familiar' rather than the bizarre in an effort to comprehend both the criminal and the efforts of the state to effect a transformation of selves and souls from outlaw to citizen.

This examination of the ‘reformational project’ has a dual quality. On the one hand, I mean to explore and - more aggressively - to interrogate the modern correctional enterprise using certain critical perspectives and tools of humanistic inquiry. On the other hand, I seek to use the correctional enterprise as a means of coming to some conclusions about some central aspects of contemporary culture. To do this, I will aspire to the status of what sociologists call the "insider/outsider" or the "stranger", in my case a status earned after a decade as a teacher in several prisons, another decade of prison research, accompanied by a parallel "normal" academic career. Thus I am insider enough to have come to know many prisoners quite well and to call some of them friends, but outsider enough to detest crime as an unreasonable intrusion on civil life and, inevitably in these times, on my life – an insider in the sense of having visited prisons and immersed myself via research in the lives of individual criminals, but outsider in the sense of sustaining a deep antipathy for prisons and fences. Thus while laying no claim to objectivity, I hope to approach the issues at hand with a combination of "...distance and nearness, indifference and involvement." . Like deTocqueville in his wanderings through early 19th century America, this position of ‘stranger’ should make it possible to see from the outside in as well as the inside out and thereby provide a perspective different from those of criminologists or the advocates of either keeper or the kept.

But this sense of ‘medium cool’ that the outsider entails with its hint of essential indifference cannot, in fact, be sustained throughout a exploration of such an emotion-ridden subject as the fate of the imprisoned selves in our midst and our complicity in the perpetuation of their condition. There is as well an advocacy agenda implicit throughout this book, an assertion that we are on the wrong path and that alternatives are readily available and accessible. Here the outsider becomes iconoclast, a ‘breaker of icons’ in the name of opening up the prison, de-professionalizing ‘corrections’, and in the process addressing prisoners as people rather than offenders.

There are three steps necessary in addressing the dual objectives of examining this modern project and assessing what it tells us about contemporary culture and about modern selves. First, we need to discover the basis for our modern belief in 'deviance' and in 'transformation' - to examine by what process we come to believe that violators of either a social contract or a moral imperative must and can be 'reformulated', 'rehabilitated' and thereby ‘transformed’ into citizens via either authoritarian or therapeutic interventions by the state. This will require a recurring look at the Enlightenment and its reverberations through the 20th century. Secondly, we need to identify the human and humane implications of such a belief, determining how its mechanisms are formulated - how a perspective or idea system is transformed into action through ideology, structures, and institutions. As well we need to assess the degree to which these rehabilitative efforts are successful. Since the record is patently not good, we need to question whether selves can in fact be purposefully transformed against their will or in opposition to their perceived interests - are 'will' and 'interest' malleable qualities? Thirdly, we will need to discover if there are alternatives, whether even in prisons there can be a more 'natural', ‘organic’, or 'authentic' process of transformation or maturation that works through empowerment of the will, communication of values, and the formation of new interests. And, if there is, how does it work, for whom does it work, and under what conditions can it work?

There is no point in attempting to explore this reformational project in the abstract. It is carried out within specific contexts - historical and institutional - and can only be comprehended and understood within those contexts. Rousseau's classic study of maturation and reformation, Emile, unfolds in the gilded prison created by the boy's tutor, a prison young Emile does not perceive but which in essence was just as authoritarian and behaviourist as the modern penitentiary. The initial focus must, therefore, be on the prison-as-context, the prison as mirror and staring eye, the prison as arbiter of the means and limits of possible change. This will necessitate several detours into the field of sight of a fourth French lens, that provided by Michel Foucault and through him into the realms of language, bureaucracy and authority.

Our collection of modern Emiles must as well be followed out of the prison and into the community in order to assess the resilience of their reformational experience. Unlike Rousseau's mind-experiment, in this study we can utilize the careers of real people, in this case about 700 former prisoners from several Canadian prisons who were released into society in the 1970s and 1980s. A cross section of the population of Canadian federal prisons, these men are 'serious offenders' who have in common participation in a particular prison education program and who, as well, took advantage of and/or were subjected to a variety of other programs designed to change, improve, repair or in some way alter their personalities, behaviours, aspirations, or needs. It is the lives of these men – as criminal, prisoner and parolee - that provide the visceral substance of the book. Thus throughout this book the focus will combine an analysis of the larger cultural and political patterns that dictate the shape and direction of the modern correctional project with perspectives gained from the lives of specific individuals caught up within the systems spawned by that project, lives recorded in sometimes excruciating detail by the various functionaries of the correctional system.

Specifically, then, this book addresses this central issue of 'what works in prison' and even more specifically just what this word 'works' means in the context of the modern criminal justice system and the culture as a whole. Some might say, with Voltaire, that it 'works' simply by being there, by protecting society from the further depredations of specific criminals, either via community supervision, incarceration or execution, or that it 'works' by acting as a deterrent to countless would be criminals, who instead choose an honest path from fear of arrest and incarceration. Still others, and these are the central figures of this study, are not content with this passive role and insist that it can only be said to 'work' if it persuades apprehended criminals to change their ways after release from incarceration. It is this issue of recidivism, or the lack thereof, that Robert Martinson used as his measure of success in his (in)famous 1974 research that asserted that in prison "nothing works", and it persists as the most common measure of 'success'. Thus the (vulgar) Rousseaueans amongst us insist that the civil society we deserve, need and can have depends on our ability to create a voluntary conformity - by coercion if necessary.

This study of interventions in the lives of prisoners, then, should serve to illuminate the larger issue of the state's ability or lack thereof to affect its citizens’ fundamental beliefs, attitudes, and needs. There is a conviction at the heart of the Enlightenment/Modern ‘Project’ that crime and deviance are ‘in the mind’, that it is indeed ‘the thought that counts’. Rousseau has in fact won out over Voltaire despite a strong tradition within modernity which persists in seeing the criminal as victim, the deviant as desperate defender of threatened needs. The penal enterprise, then, becomes a field not of punishment but of internal reformation, a field of struggle brilliantly explored by George Orwell in 1984.

In this sense the prison becomes a laboratory, a 'refined' realm in which the state seemingly has all the advantages, the imprisoned having as resources only resistance, manipulation, will, or blind faith. Far from being a mere 'warehouse' for the apprehended and sentenced offender, the correctional archipelago (of which the penitentiary/prison is the major part) has defined its mission as being a persuader, reformer, and educator and its products are meant to be compliant, productive, obedient citizens. It is here that the bureaucratic recording of these imprisoned lives is most revealing for it provides us with a systematic and necessary given the seriousness of the task, look at how we think we work as humans. In virtually all cases the correctional system rejects the medieval (and post-modern?) Sadean view of 'bad people' and opts for the Enlightenment's more generous and optimistic perspective of people 'gone bad' who are in most cases 'correctable'. The 'how' of this correcting is the stuff of meaning for criminologists, psychologists and other specialists, but it is the correctable part per se that is of generic interest because it tells us how we have come to understand ourselves. The prisoner is the captured, dull, remorseless, dysfunctional, dis-engaged, ill-employed, pleasure-seeking deviant - the opposite of which is the 'citizen', the participant in the body politic, the contributor to the general welfare and the self concerned for the well-being of fellow citizens. From the terror, boredom and ecstasy of the criminal life, the state prescribes, indeed demands, a transition to the "...silent heroism of daily living...".

But I argue here that there is another, counter tradition within the Enlightenment, a tradition less obsessed by reason and the rational, but instead grounded in a more agreeable blending of the rational and the romantic, reason and passion. Grounded in a more romantic version of Rousseau, this approach retains the modern universalist ideal that citizenship is possible even with most troubled of our peers if we appreciate their complexity, treat them with respect, and demand reciprocity. Treat them, in other words, as subjects. It was in my own experience with an education program in prison that I sensed the power of this alternative tradition, the power of the traditional subject matter of the liberal arts to, in Jefferson’s words, "inform their discretion", discretion in this sense involving more than mere reason and certainly more than simply emotion, but rather a dynamic combination of the two. It was this conviction that something more than just education was going on in those seminars and endless discussions with the prisoner-students that persuaded me to make their post-prison lives my research project. These lives, then, taken collectively in statistical form or individually as case studies, become evidence for the transformative potential of this more romantic and authentic tradition within the modern.