FORENSIC HYPNOSIS

At 6:30 P.M. on December 30, 1975, a powerful bomb
exploded in one of the baggage lockers at New York's La Guardia International Airport, instantly killing fourteen unsuspecting travelers and airline workers and injuring seventy more.

No one claimed responsibility and the Palestinian Liberation Organization actually condemned the act. Despite a rigorous investigation, the police had no leads. Then a man came forward and told the investigators that he did see something a bit strange. He said that he had seen a man walking towards the lockers with a suitcase resting on his arms as if he was carrying a cake. He also said that he saw the man place the suitcase into one of the coin-operated lockers.

The bomb experts agreed with the police investigators that a terrorist might carry a suitcase like that if he had placed a bomb in it and didn't want to accidentally set it off. As an aside, it may have been the same kind of bomb used by Colonel von Stauffenberg when he attempted to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. He used a small capsule of acid to burn through a thin wire that, when severed, would release the striker that would activate the bomb.

There was very little that the witness could remember other than the unusual manner in which the bomber carried his suitcase and the approximate locker the suitcase was placed.

The investigators asked Detective Sergeant Charles Diggett of the New York Police Department to assist in the questioning of the witness. Diggett was a forensic hypnotist, one who uses hypnotism as an investigative tool for investigating a crime. The witness was a very good subject in that he could be easily hypnotized. Once in a deep trance, he was able to go back into the depth of his mind and recollect the actual event.

With careful probing, Diggett was able to learn from the witness' recollection of the event, greater detail of what he saw. The witness remembered every detail of what the suspect looked like, what he was wearing and the size, colour, material, and type of suitcase he was carrying and equally important, he was able to pinpoint the exact locker that the bomb had been placed in.

Alas, having a description of the bomber is not the same as having him in your hands. To this day, no one has ever been arrested for that crime. But what this particular incident shows is that forensic hypnosis is a valuable tool in the fight against crime.

To the uninformed, hypnosis may seem like a lot of hocus pocus about nothing but as a former practicing hypnotist, I can assure you that it is anything but a lot of hocus pocus.

Diggett was able to probe into the recesses of the witness' mind because he knew that the memory of the event had not been erased from his mind. To understand why, one must have an inkling of what memory is all about. To do that, let's go back to the witness’ mind while he was at the scene of the bombing.

The witness is watching a man walking with his suitcase in his arms as if he is carrying a cake. The image of what he is seeing is shooting its way along one million nerve fibres leading to the optical lobe at the back of his brain. The image splays over the region of the optical lobe 5000 times larger than what the image was when it first entered the 100 million light-sensitive cells in the retinas of his eyeballs.

Instantly, his mind begins questioning the logic of what he is seeing but at the same time this is happening, a copy of that image is sent directly to the amygdala (almond shaped semi-brain which regulates 'fright and fight') and from there, to the cerebrum (which is also a semi-brain) situated at the rear and top of the brain. It is in the cerebrum that the memory of the event is stored. There it rests amidst both notable and non-descript events in his life, such as his first love, his last meal, graduation day, the man carrying the suitcase in his arms. It is stored in his memory with fifteen or more trillion separate bits of information. Actually, there can be more bits of information stored in the human brain than there are actual brain cells to receive them.

Space doesn't permit me to go into the complexities of how the memory works but it is suffice to say that unless the witness had suffered from amnesia, everything that happened to him relating to his five senses, and his thoughts on each of these events, was recorded in his brain. All the hypnotist has to do is to delve through trillions of memory bits to piece them together so that the bits and pieces make a better picture of the event that the witness remembers. If you think that is easy, try looking for a paragraph in a book in a library that has all the books randomly stored in hundreds of shelves with no titles on the books and do that in less than an hour.

What the hypnotist does is to get his subject to reorganize his thinking in order to get his books (memories) organized not unlike the Dewey System used in libraries so that he can get easy access to them. Then the hypnotist gets his subject to go directly to the right book, (year, month, and day) the right chapter, (event) and finally to the actual page, (particulars as to what is happening) where the paragraph can be found. (what he saw, heard, and felt at the time)

To get the subject to look for a particular aspect of an occurrence (book, chapter, page and paragraph) in his library of memories, the hypnotist must put the subject into a trance-like-state where the subject can then concentrate on the search for particulars without his subject’s conscious thoughts interfering with his search. The subject has to be put in a semi-conscious state.

I am often asked if there are some special words needed to put someone asleep or if a hypnotist can put someone under his spell by getting that person to look into the hypnotist's eyes. Hypnotism really doesn't work like that. That's the stuff movies are made of. It should be said however that there are many ways of bringing about a hypnotic trance in someone. Many methods involve fixing one’s eyes on a moving object such as a pocket watch, the end of a pen or a small light but these methods must of course also incorporate verbal suggestions. Many hypnotists (myself included) prefer to have the subject close his or her eyes although I have induced people into a light trance while they were walking down the street with their eyes wide open and they weren’t even aware as to what was happening to them.

In reality, hypnosis is really the power of suggestion that influences the human mind. For example, if someone begins telling you about spiders crawling up your back, (and you fear spiders) you will begin experiencing a itchy feeling up your spine. If someone begins describing the food at a banquet, (and you are hungry) you will in all probability begin salivating. This happens because you can relate to what is being described to you. And that is because somewhere in your library of memories, are the memories of similar-like experiences which, when recounted, come to your consciousness and you subconsciously react accordingly.

For this reason, if a hypnotist drones on that you are getting sleepy and he tells you that your eyes feel as if there is sand in them and that you feel sluggish and tired, you will experience these things because you have done so many times in the past through the natural process of sleep.

Of course, this will only happen because you are prepared to let it happen. If you don't want to be hypnotized, it is almost impossible for the hypnotist to put you into a trance. I use the word, 'almost' because he can do it if you are forced to undergo listening to his suggestions on and on to such an extent that natural sleep inevitably comes to you. A good example of this is listening to a boring homily by a priest or church minister who drones on and on.

Hypnosis is so incredibly easy that a talented child can be trained to do it. Most people have a longing to be lulled to sleep and the hypnotist takes advantage of this yearning. The hypnotist talks to his subject in a rhythmic and soothing manner, the cadence of his speech almost mimicking a lullaby. An accomplished hypnotist is very much aware that his manner, rhythm of speech, and emphasis on certain words are as important as the actual content of the words he uses.

There has always been the perpetual myth that only weak minded people can be hypnotized. Actually it is the converse that is true. Weak minded people are extremely difficult to hypnotize. That is because they cannot imagine in their minds what the hypnotist is trying to tell them.

The best subjects for hypnotism are children, (because they are trusting) people who have had stern parents or stern teachers, (because they are accustomed to obeying) and religious people (because they accept dogma so readily). Of course it helps when the subject is motivated by the desire to search for the truth or because he is in need of help. Incidentally, men and women are equally hypnotizable and about 95 percent of us are susceptible to hypnotic suggestions to some degree, and 5 percent are susceptible to the most difficult hypnotic suggestions.

The hardest subjects (aside from the weak minded and impaired) are those who consciously and subconsciously fight hypnosis because of real fears (such as having their inner-most secrets accidentally discovered) or unreal fears (such as being raped). I can also say that it is very difficult for a hypnotist to be hypnotized by another hypnotist because he would have his mind on the latter's techniques rather than on going to sleep. I speak from experience.

The witness in the La Guardia bombing was a good subject because he was of normal intelligence, he wanted to help in any way that he could and he wasn't afraid of hypnosis.

This is a good time to go into another case where Detective Sergeant Diggett was called upon for the purposes of delving into the lost memories of a witness. Only in this case, the witness was also the victim.

Martin Kruger had been married to his wife Paula for a number of years but by October 1979, they had been separated for eleven months. Then one evening in that month, he showed up at their home in Westchester County (just north of the Bronx in New York) at his wife's insistence to pick up his record albums. No one answered the door so he went inside the house. It was dark and the light switch didn't flick on when he entered the living room.

Suddenly he heard a noise behind him and as he turned, he felt a sharp crack across the top of his skull. He had been hit with a baseball bat. He slumped to the floor and while in a daze, he called out, "Help me to my feet." Unseen hands helped him up and just as he was propped against the wall, the baseball bat came down on his head again.

Someone placed the cold end of a pistol to the back of Martin's head and then he heard a popping sound, followed by a ringing in his left ear. Miraculously, he lived even though a bullet had entered his head.

Then he heard two male voices, one asking what they should do with him and the other saying that they had to get him out of the city. They put him in the trunk of his own car and drove him to a deserted junkyard where they then tossed his 'lifeless' body onto a pile of junk. He came too but waited before tring to escape (good thing he did because they returned to to the car to pick up the quilt they carried him in) so he finally managed to escape and get help. He was then rushed to the hospital.

The police suspected his wife as the prime mover in the attempt on her husband's life and the fact that she was the beneficiary of a one-hundred-thousand dollar life insurance policy, didn't allay their suspicions.

In the course of being questioned by the police in order to get as much information as possible about who might have carried out Paula's wishes, Martin remembered something that had happened several weeks earlier. It seems that Paula needed the unlisted phone number of a male friend who would lend her a thousand dollars to pay for her Mexican divorce. Since Martin was an employee of the phone company, he had access to unlisted phone numbers and could get it. Paula gave him the name of the man and when Martin got the man's number, he passed it onto his wife.

This information was significant because he remembered that the first name of the man his wife was searching for was also the first name that one of the would-be killers called the other. The name was Joe. But try as hard as he could, he couldn't remember the last name nor could he remember the phone number.

It was at this juncture of the investigation that the hypnocop, Diggett was called into the case. It was hoped that he could jog the memory of Martin Kruger.

Because Martin was distracted by his injuries, (the bullet was still in his head) he was a difficult subject to put under, but nevertheless, Diggett managed to put him into a medium level trance.

A person in this kind of trance can easily regress into his subconscious mind in his search for particulars of an event in his past. It should be mentioned at this time that almost all persons can be placed into this level of hypnosis. It is in this state that there is automatic obedience to commands (providing that the hypnotist doesn't make demands upon his subject that the subject wouldn't ordinarily obey while in his waking state. This is useful when searching through the depths of a person's mind for forgotten clues of an event.

With careful probing, Diggett was able to help Martin search in his library of memories, and pull out the first three digits of the phone number and the first two letters of Joe's last name. It was enough to locate the missing 'Joe' and from that, they were able to convict Joe, his confederate and Paula of attempted murder.

You may well wonder why the search didn't uncover the full last name and the entire phone number. The information was there alright but who knows what condition that particular page in that particular book in his library of memories might have been in after being shot in the head? Sometimes the memory of an event is so painful, that no amount of hypnotic probing will uncover the facts hidden away in the depths of the human mind. That can be a good thing because often the mind deliberately hides an event so as not to haunt the person with recurring memories of it. A sort of guardian of our sanity so to speak.

One night on October 19, 1980, a young woman in Hawaii was raped and beaten and she only had a spotty recollection of the event. Months after the suspect was arrested, she was still having nightmares so her therapist hypnotized her and in the course of regressing back to the night she was raped and beaten, she discovered that she had been raped by a second man also. He was arrested and both men were convicted.

In San Francisco, two young girls were raped and one of the girls while under hypnosis, remembered distinguishing rust spots on the car they were carried in and even remembered the location of a service station where the abductor had the car repaired. He was arrested and convicted.

Cases like the aforementioned have made hypnosis a very important investigative tool because without the use of hypnosis in these cases, the memories of these events would have been buried too deep in the minds of these subjects to ever bring them to the surface.

Unfortunately, there have been striking cases where witnesses and victims who have been hypnotized for the purpose of bringing to their conscious minds, the descriptions of the criminals, and they have been wrong in who they perceived as the criminals.

A case in point is the one in Philadelphia where a sailor in 1975 was shot but not seriously wounded. The police had a suspect but the sailor couldn't positively identify him. It was suggested that he be hypnotized so that he would have a better recollection of the event. After he was hypnotized, he described the suspect as the man who shot him. It turned out that the suspect was totally innocent. The wrong man had been identified by the victim.

It is fairly easy to see what went wrong here. The victim presumed that if the suspect was in a line-up, he must be the one who shot him. That rationale carried right on into his subconscious mind. The sailor had already seen the suspect in a line-up when he was in a conscious state so after he was hypnotized, he was able to describe who he thought the suspect was by simply describing who he perceived to be the suspect.

There is always a danger of this because when a person is in a hypnotic trance, he is very susceptible to suggestions. Imagined events can seem as authentic as reality and the images can be extremely vivid resulting in a heightened level of fantasy.

Kenneth Bowers, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario says that the image becomes so compelling that subjects 'can no longer discriminate between what they made up and what actually happened.'

Strangely enough, hypnotized subjects are more apt to guess at what they saw than those who are conscious and asked to state what they saw. You may recall that I said earlier that everything we see, hear etc., is recorded in our memory banks. However, studies have shown that we have a tendency to use those memories of those events as a foundation of what occurred and then begin building our fantasies on top of the foundation until the event becomes a mixture of reality and fantasy. No amount of hypnotic digging will be able to separate the reality from the fantasy.

Bower and Jane Dywan, psychologists at McMaster University reported in Science that although hypnosis increases recall, it also increases errors. In their study, hypnotized subjects correctly recalled twice as many items as as a control group but also made three times as many mistakes.

What this means is that people under hypnosis can inadvertently alter their memories of a past event by omitting certain occurrences or by adding details to the occurrences that were never there.

If anything, this certainly points out the danger of relying entirely on the testimony of a witness who had been earlier hypnotized into recalling an event in his or her past. It certainly points out the need to have such a hypnotic session recorded on a video tape for careful scrutiny by all parties concerned.

This is why the statement of a witness that has been obtained under hypnosis isn’t accepted in court. Its use is more of an investigative tool.

Many years ago, I was retained by a criminal lawyer in Toronto to look into the conduct of a woman who claimed that she had been kidnapped and then set free in a large ravine behind her home. A kidnap note had been found by the police but after they interviewed the woman, they concluded that she must have written
it herself and then walked to the ravine in the middle of the night on her own. They intended to charge her with public mischief and that's when I was called upon to interview her. Her lawyer, her doctor and the police were all very anxious to know what really happened. But none more than the woman, because she was convinced that she had been kidnapped and everyone believed in her sincerity, albeit she didn't completely allay their suspicions.

After several visits, I told her that the only way that we could learn the truth was for me to hypnotize her and get her to relive the 'kidnapping' while she was in a trance.

I put her into a deep somnambulistic state and while she was in that state, I had her regress back to the early morning hours when she was 'kidnapped' and relive it. As to be expected, she got up on her own and went through the motions of getting dressed. (she was already dressed at that time) Then she went to the kitchen and wrote on a pad (which was left where she usually left it) the kidnap note. Then she left the building and walked to the ravine where she promptly awoke.

I didn't attempt to rationalize as to what prompted her to act in this fashion because her doctor was far better trained than I was to look into the hidden causes of her sleepwalking but it is suffice to say that she never sleepwalked in that particular manner again and the police chose to let the matter drop.

Forensic hypnosis is undoubtedly a useful tool when used to refresh the memories of victims and witnesses of crimes they have experienced or seen.

HYPNOTHERAPY: Part III

There is one very important aspect of hypnosis that cannot be overlooked. It is hypnotherapy. There are many things that can happen to us that are best shunted into the depths of our subconscious mind but even while in there, they can haunt us. I will give you an example of this.

A young seaman came to me in 1954 complaining that he hated his mother but didn't know why. He said that he couldn't think of anything she did or said that would prompt his hatred for her. He knew I had been experimenting with regression, that is, making my subjects remember childhood experiences, so he asked me to have him regress back into his childhood to find the event that triggered his hatred for his mother.

Let me say that that was no easy task. Trying to find a paragraph in a book in a library in which every book is randomly placed in packing cases is extremely difficult. In this young man's case, I couldn't even find the library.

For several weeks of careful probing (an hour each day after supper) I still couldn't find anything. Then an idea came to me. I had read a book in which the experimenter had actually had his subjects regress to a time before their births---(and I am not talking about reincarnation)

Sure enough, as I had this seaman regress backwards from his first birthday, together, we reached the event of his birth (in which his memory of it is an amazing story in itself)

I regressed him further until we reached the beginning of the last trimester, that is---three months before his birth. He could hear noises and his mother's voice. It was then that I discovered the source of his problem. His mother had attempted an abortion and screamed out that she didn't want her baby. She changed her mind but the memory of the event was fixed into his developing fetal brain and remained there all through his childhood and young adult years.

I had him relive this experience and then, while he was in that regressed state, I put him into a state of amnesia. While he was in that state, I replaced the offending event with a more pleasurable one, such as the mother saying how much she wanted her baby. Then I brought him out of the trance. He remembered nothing of what I had put him through, but back in the deep recesses of his brain, was a memory (actually a fantasy) of a loving mother saying how much she wanted her baby.

I spoke to him several months later and he told me that his mother and he got along just fine. He said that he could never understand why he hated her so much in the past and naturally, I never disclosed her secret or for that matter, his own subconscious secret to him.

Victims of crimes who suffer from traumatic experiences should be encouraged to forget the experiences, or short of that, at least have the memories of them obscured in a sense so that little of the memories of what occurred to them won't come back to haunt them later. There is truth in the saying that 'time heals all' and the reason why that is so is true is because the memory of a bad experience is shunted further and further into the recesses of the mind as more current memories are piled onto the traumatic memory. It is for this reason that victims of crimes are encouraged to get out and do things to get their minds away from the tragedies and traumas in their lives. The more they do this, the more new memories are created that will push the memories of the traumatic experience further from the conscious mind.

Sometimes however, no amount of attempts at suppressing bad memories will stop the event from returning to the victim's conscious mind like a bad dream. That is when a psychiatrist or a hypnotherapist is called upon to assist. And when the memory of a certain event is an old memory that will not go away, a hypnotherapist will attempt to at least alter the memory of his patient's bad experience with a fantasy while the memory of the traumatic event is deep in the recesses of his or her mind.

I would be remiss if I did not finish this article with the warning that the practicing of hypnosis by untrained individuals can be dangerous to those persons willing to be hypnotized.

I remember the first mistake I made and that mistake could have ruined a man's life. When a person is being hypnotized, he will generally be totally absorbed exclusively with what the hypnotist is telling him, but he can still perceive other stimuli around him such as traffic and people talking outside the room. Subsequently, when my subject (that’s what we call those we hypnotize) heard these noises while I was hypnotizing him, this young man thought he was still awake. To get around this, I told him that he would hear every noise, even when he was asleep.

That in itself may seem harmless but my mistake was that when I brought him out of the trance, I didn't remove the suggestion about hearing everything while he was asleep. For two months, he suffered from insomnia because every noise he heard at night, kept him awake. When he approached me about his insomnia, it suddenly dawned on me what I had done, so I re-hypnotized him and removed the offending suggestion and he slept like a baby after that.

No. I didn't tell him that he would 'sleep like a baby'. If I had, he would be bed wetting for the rest of his life.

Giving post-hypnotic suggestions is fraught with danger because a hypnotist may go too far. For example, an amateur who hypnotizes a subject who cannot swim, into having no fear of water, may later inadvertently bring about the subject's death if the subject goes boating without a life jacket. Remember, he has no fear of water but he also hasn't learned to swim yet.

An amateur may give a post hypnotic suggestion that will or will not be enacted years later. For example, if he tells his subject that when he meets a certain kind of woman, he will have an overpowering desire to have sex with her. If the subject takes that suggestion literally, he may not be sexually aroused until he meets that 'certain kind of woman' and he may never meet such a woman and hence, his sex life will be curtailed. On the other hand, he may be so overwhelmed, he may literally rape a woman who fits the category of being that 'certain woman'.

Amateur hypnotists who use hypnosis to probe into the psyche of unstable people may misinterpret what they are being told and therefore give wrong advice. A person in a hypnotic state may be propelled into a severe post-hypnotic state that can continue unchecked for many months. This is particularly true in borderline psychosis. In the hands of a qualified psychotherapist, the subject can be treated but in the hands of an amateur, the risk of creating problems beyond the grasp of the amateur's ability to cope with them is high.

Hypnosis is extremely useful in bringing old memories to the fore. It is those old memories that dictate our lives. If we can get access to those memories, we might find out what makes us tick. And for that purpose, as well as others, this science should be followed up more than it is. But remember this. If someone looks you in the face and says in a cooing voice, "Look into my eyes!" the chances are; he is an amateur hypnotist. An experienced hypnotist doesn't coo---he makes demands and you will be under his spell before you know it---if you don't fight it.

HYPNOTHERAPY: Can it help victims of crime? Part II

Hypnotherapy is not a new phenomenon in the science of treating people who are ill. It more or less began in the latter part of the 18th century with Franz Mesmer, a Viennese physician who used it to treat his patients. Because of his mistaken belief that it was an occult force, (he had his patients sit in vats of water which contained ground glass or iron filings) he was soon discredited and it wasn't until after World War I that hypnotherapy began to be taken seriously and in the 1950's hypnotherapy suddenly increased in popularity with many psychiatrists using it when treating some of their patients.

Most hypnotists, (entertainers and hypnotherapists alike) recognize that no two people react to hypnotic suggestions in the same manner. For example, some people can be put in a light trance (somewhat like day dreaming) and be susceptible to a major suggestion of having an entire limb go numb. When I was practicing hypnosis, sometimes I could create a blister on a subject's arm while he was in that kind of trance by placing a coin on his arm and telling him that it was red hot. There is nothing magical about this at all. It is simply convincing the subject that what the hypnotist says, is true. The subject believes it and his body defences react to the suggestion and a blister forms. I suppose the word 'hypnotism' can be best described as 'salesmanship'. The hypnotist sells his subject on the idea that whatever the hypnotist tells him, it is absolutely the truth. Once accepted, the sale is made.

If the person however does not believe that he can be hypnotized, or doesn't believe that the hypnotist can hypnotize him or doesn't trust the hypnotist, then the person cannot and will not be hypnotized. It follows then that hypnotherapy only works for those people who want it to work for them.

There are many uses of hypnotherapy but for the purpose of this piece, I intend to only deal with hypnotherapy which is used in treating crime victims who have suffered from current or distant emotional trauma.

Alice Robertson (a pseudonym) was three-years-old when her step-father began molesting her. The molestation continued for the next two years and ended when she told her mother. Upon being discovered, he abandoned the family and was seen no more. Alice pushed the memories of the assaults out of her conscious mind as she grew older and by the time she was in her late teens, the memories didn't remain in her conscious mind any longer.

But alas, sexual assaults on very young children sometimes have a way of hovering in their subconscious minds as psychological wounds that never really heal; wounds that are as traumatic as if the assaults just happened. Memories of events like that are buried deep in the subconscious and yet they have a way of resurfacing out of the depths of one's mind and reaching out to the conscious state, albeit very subliminally, to scar the conscious mind in a way that the victim is not even aware of the psychological damage his or her mind is undergoing.

As Alice grew older, she was uncomfortable in the company of boys and when she was in her early twenties, she found herself even more uncomfortable in the presence of men. She would refuse offers of dates and began to get quite surly to men who even hinted at wanting to go out with her.

Human beings have a natural instinct to want to be loved and it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that she began going out with women her own age and within a year, she became intimate with one of them. They shared an apartment together and soon became regular lovers. Alice's introduction into the life of lesbianism came about because of her subconscious hatred and fear of men and because of her feelings of guilt. She didn't feel guilty for what had happened to her but she had told her mother what her stepfather was doing to her and as a result, he subsequently left them, and for this, she needlessly later felt responsible and guilty for the breakup of the family.

Traumatic situations result in emotional conditioning rather than in responses learned through reasoning and problem solving. The trouble facing victims of incest and other crimes is that it is easier for them to shut out the experience from their conscious minds rather than face it head on and try to solve it.

For children, it's almost if not impossible for them to face the trauma. In one sense, this is a good thing because no one wants to be forever remembering traumatic experiences as if they just happened a short time ago. It's our way of coping. But these experiences have a way of returning and consequently, exposure to similar situations tends to reactivate the emotional response (in Alice's case--it was fear and hatred of men and the guilt which was hidden even deeper)) instead of accepting a rational explanation (her childhood experiences with her stepfather in which he alone was the guilty party) for her attitude towards men.

The after-effects of her sexual experiences with her stepfather lingered on because her mother didn't do anything to reassure Alice of her love. This may have been difficult for the mother since the discovery of her husband's criminal sexual assaults on her daughter resulted in him leaving her forever, thereby forcing her to live a loveless life without another man. She, unwittingly abandoned her daughter to a loveless childhood.

As Alice grew into middle age, her hatred of men was even more pronounced and she had difficulty in keeping jobs where she had to work with men as co-workers and if she was alone at night, she would walk across the street rather than walk towards a man approaching her on her side of the street. Strange as this may seem, Alice was completely unaware of why she had this hatred and fear of men. Her childhood experiences with her stepfather were buried so deep in her subconscious that if they resurfaced, it was of such a short duration that she didn't really fathom what was bothering her.

This is where hypnotherapy can help. But in order for Alice (or anyone suffering as Alice has suffered) can benefit from hypnotherapy, she must have absolute trust in her therapist. It is extremely difficult for an adult such as Alice to bare her soul to a friend and tell of her stepfather's incestuous relationship with her and it is sometimes even harder to tell all to a complete stranger. If she could have done that, she could have got it off her chest and faced the unpleasant memories easier. By facing these unwanted memories, she would eventually learn what turned her into the woman she was. But unfortunately for Alice, her memories of the assaults were hidden so deeply, she didn't even remember them. But they were there and like unseen insects biting here and there, they began gnawing at her, until the incessant gnawing into her conscious mind altered her concept of what men were really like. Her mind would no longer accept men as humans capable of tender love and affection, but rather, she saw them as animals who would hurt and abuse her.

The sexual abuse thrust upon her by her stepfather literally destroyed this woman. If she had been given psychiatric treatment coupled with hypnotherapy at an early age, it is possible that she may have been able to lead an ordinary life and got married and had children of her own.

CRIMINAL HYPNOSIS Part 1

In 1950, I began practicing hypnosis when I was sixteen years of age. When I was serving in the Canadian navy, I, at the age of 18, was asked by a doctor in the navy, to place one of the sailors in a post-hypnotic state as he couldn’t be given any anesthetic while his teeth were being removed. The last time I practiced hypnosis was when my wife’s doctor asked me to put my wife under hypnosis just before our first child was born in 1977. In the past, I was able to hypnotize people over the phone, hypnotize thirty people at the same time and even hypnotize strangers on the street when they didn’t even know they were being hypnotized. This article is the first of several articles I will be writing for my readers on this subject.

Anyone who has ever seen the movie, Svengali, will recognize how a susceptible person can be put under a hypnotic spell. In his story by du Maurier, a mesmerizing teacher turns one of his pupils into an actress.

None of this can work unless the persons under the spell of orators or teachers really want to believe that they can be hypnotized. Once you have that combination of trust, suggestibility and belief in the orator or teacher, the masses and individuals will for the most part, be hypnotized into accepting anything the orator or teacher says as being gospel.

Because of the power of hypnotism, it can be used to induce persons to commit crimes on a limited scale. I say limited because it must be remembered that everyone has that 'line' in which they will not cross. A good example of this is often retold about the young assistant lecturer who tried to get a woman to undress in a lecture hall. The professor had put her asleep and then got called out of the room. He asked his assistant to take over. He promptly told the young woman to undress and she promptly slapped the assistant across his face and walked out of the lecture hall. Although she was in a subconscious state, she was aware of where she was and what the assistant was asking her to do.

He failed in his attempt because he tried to get the girl to do something that she wouldn't normally do----that is undress on a platform in a lecture hall in front of a classroom of leering young medical students. He probably would have succeeded in his nefarious experiment if he had told the young woman that she was in the privacy of her bedroom and was getting undressed to go to bed.

So in effect, there is another aspect of inducing a person to obey a hypnotist, and that is by trickery. It is only through trickery that a law-abiding person will commit a crime under hypnosis.

I conducted such an experiment while I was in the Royal Canadian Navy in the early fifties. (As an aside, I was ordered to appear before several doctors when it was learned that I was practicing hypnosis. They asked me what I was doing. I promptly hypnotized one of them and they realized that they had found a man who could be useful if surgery was going to be performed without anesthesia because some people cannot be anesthetized with drugs. I was only called upon to do this on one occasion however and I successfully put the patient asleep for his operation) I was left alone to experiment on any seaman willing to let me improve my hypnotic skill on him.

Dr. Lewis Wolberg, a well respected American hypnotherapist had stated in one of his books that although it was possible to induce a person to commit a crime, that person would later remember who hypnotized him into committing the crime. I was anxious to find out if he was right. With all respect to this great hypnotist, he was wrong.

In my experiment, I gave a post hypnotic suggestion that in a week, my subject would go to a certain room in one of the buildings on the naval base and that once inside the room, he would close the door behind him. I told him that he would be alone in the room and that he would hear a voice and would obey every command given to him by that voice.

When he entered the room a week later and closed the door behind him, he was not alone. I was in the room with him. But because I had put a post-hypnotic suggestion in his mind that he would be alone, he did not see me. His eyes picked up my image but his brain did not register what he saw. Hence, for all intents and purposes, he was alone in the room.

I then spoke (which shocked him to no end) and he obeyed my every command (which shocked him even more). When I told him to fall to the floor, he did, because he had been conditioned a week earlier to obey my every command.

I convinced him that it was his conscious that was speaking to him. To a person who finds himself obeying every command given to him by a disembodied voice---this is easily accepted by such a subject. Keep in mind that he was fully awake and not in a trance. He was acting solely on instructions placed in his mind a week earlier---instructions he couldn't remember being given when first hypnotized because after I planted the post-hypnotic suggestion in his mind, I then put him into a state of amnesia so that he wouldn't remember being hypnotized, or for that matter even being in a room with me when he was first hypnotized.

I told him that as his conscious, I had complete control over his mind and that he would obey me unquestionably. He said that he understood. Then I told him that I had communicated with the conscious of another person and that that other person was going to come into the room and try to strangle him. He didn't believe (me) his conscious---that is until the other person (upon a pre-arranged signal) entered the room. When the other person began approaching my subject, my subject rushed him and began strangling the other man. The other man was bigger so no harm was done but he did slump to the floor as if dead.

My other confederates rushed into the room and asked my subject what he had done. He said that he strangled the other man because the latter was attempting to kill him.

Now came the test. Remember that my subject still couldn't see me and my confederates acted as if I wasn't there. One of the men asked my subject why he thought that the other man was going to kill him. It was at this point that I wasn't sure if my subject would point to me and say that I told him or whether or not he would say that his conscious told him.

He said that it was his conscious that told him. No matter how hard my confederates told him that was the stupidest thing they ever heard, my subject stuck with that story. Later, I was able to erase the event from his mind and he went out with the others and 'the victim' for a drink and some laughs.

Several weeks later, I re-hypnotized the man again in an attempt to get him to relive the 'strangling' event. He had some trouble bringing that back in his mind. Then I regressed him back to the time and place when and where I had first hypnotized him and had placed the post-hypnotic suggestion in his mind.

He could not remember. When I had given him the post-hypnotic suggestion at that time that he would obey my every command, and then immediately placed him into a state of amnesia, I had put in a series of key words that could undo the command that put him into a state of amnesia. The words were, "The cow jumped over the moon." Until I coupled that sentence with the command that he would remember everything that was said to him when he was first hypnotized, his mind was a blank. It was the same as a password being put in a computer. Until that password is typed in, the screen will remain a blank. The information is still in his mind but without the passwords, it is difficult if not impossible to retrieve it.

I had in effect, actually induced a man to commit a crime and later remember nothing of the post-hypnotic suggestion that prompted him to commit the crime or for that matter, remember who had hypnotized him in the first place. But to do this, I had to go through elaborate steps to bring it about.

Let me say at this juncture of this article, that it's not likely that any hypnotist can simply put someone into a hypnotic trance and then expect that person to commit a crime while in that trance or commit the crime weeks later while acting under some post-hypnotic command. Most persons, if not all, would refuse to commit the crime unless they had a propensity to commit the crime in the first place, (in which case, they wouldn't need to be hypnotized) or alternatively, they were tricked into committing the crime (in which case, even a non-hypnotized person can be tricked if he believes and trusts the person giving the command).

This is a good time to tell you about an interesting case that took place in the United States in 1989. Mathew and Pamela Shultz and their two sons, ages 13 and 17, lived in Sarasota, Florida. He was a gun buff who like to act like he was a marine (which he never was) He taught his sons how to shoot guns and run obstacle courses. He also taught them how to rob stores. The two boys robbed a computer store, a shoe store and several food stores. When they saw the robbery of one of the stores being re-enacted on TV, the family fled to Red Bank, a small town in Tennessee. There, the two boys robbed a Pizza Hut and it was there that the boys were caught. It was in Red Bank that the police learned that the two boys had supposedly been hypnotized into committing their crimes, hypnotized by their 'fagan-like' father. The father had even gone so far as to hypnotize the oldest boy into dressing up as a young woman.

The police in Florida have gone on record as saying that they didn't believe that the boys were hypnotized into committing the robberies or that the oldest was hypnotized into dressing and acting like a young woman--and quite frankly, neither do I. Admittedly, one of the victims stated that the boys didn't appear to be frightened at all when they were robbing him. But that can be attributed to being brainwashed by their father into believing that no one would shoot them because they were just boys.

As I have said it earlier, people cannot be hypnotized into committing crimes that they normally wouldn't commit unless they have a propensity to commit crimes in the first place. The older boy may have balked at dressing up as a young woman but he did it nevertheless without being hypnotized if his father convinced him that in order not to be discovered and arrested for the robberies, it was the best method of concealment.

I have never heard of another case where the excuse offered as a defence in a robbery trial is that the robber was hypnotized into committing the robberies. It is far fetched and I would be surprised if a jury bought it.

If you ever saw the movie, The Manchurian Candidate, you will remember that the story was about a young man who had been captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and hypnotized to obey a certain command years later---the command being given by his mother who would use him to assassinate a politician. It was great stuff for a movie but in reality, it couldn't happen. In actual fact, with all the brainwashing the American soldiers had to endure in Korea, not one prisoner was successfully given a post-hypnotic suggestion to commit a crime after he was returned home to the United States.

However, another movie called Telephon, raised an interesting possibility. In the story, the Russians had placed post-hypnotic suggestions in the minds of young recruits that could be triggered by anyone who read a line from a certain poem. Later, the recruits were smuggled into the United States to live normal lives with the Americans. If a war between the USSR and the USA began, these recruits would be phoned by a Russian spy and the line from the poem read to them and they would then do the things that they had been ordered to do (many years earlier) such as blow up factories etc.

Since this has in fact, never been tried, it is difficult to say whether or not this concept would work. It would depend a great deal on how the recruits assimilated into the mainstay of American society. If they thought of themselves as Americans, it wouldn't work but if they still thought of themselves as Russians, it just might work at that.

We are all prone at one time or another to being in a half-sleep condition and acting strangely and when we awake, we can't really remember what happened. There is one case where a Toronto sleepwalker drove his car across the city and killed his mother-in-law. Obviously such persons have their eyes open and they hear everything around them and yet, they are not fully awake. They are midway between being conscious and unconscious. Since they can hear voices, it follows that they will obey commands.

It is a strange quirk in human nature that a mother will sleep through the noise of a passing train and yet wake up at the slightest sound from her sleeping baby. This gives you some idea of what it is like to be in a hypnotic trance. You are aware of what is going on around you and yet you tend to ignore it unless you sense an emergency situation in which you must immediately respond to.

This brings us to the phenomenon of sleeping with our eyes open. This can be done by sleepwalkers and also by being put in a hypnotic trance. It must be remembered that sleeping doesn't stop bodily functions, such as breathing, turning over, listening to voices so it follows that a person in some state of sleep can be made to open his eyes. And the opening of his eyes doesn't automatically waken him out of his hypnotic trance.

In the sixties, I used to conduct experiments in 'group' hypnosis. I would sit ten or more people in a room and then dim the lights down until they were off. All they would see was a small light from a pen light which was across the room. Twenty seconds later, I would slowly bring the room lights up until they were on full intensity. Despite the fact that the room was then well lit, the subjects (with the exception of a few) would continue to stare at that small light, oblivious to everything else within the range of their eyesight. That is because I told them that they would see nothing else and that no matter how hard they tried to stop staring at that one small light, they could not. They stared at the light so I had in effect, made them prisoners of a pen light.

The hypnotic effect eventually wore off and these people continued on as if nothing had happened, except that each of them during the evening would occasionally turn their heads to face the pen light and stare at it for a few seconds.

What is interesting about this 'parlour' trick is that at no time during this experiment, did I put any of them to sleep. What I did do to them was to put them into a 'waking' hypnotic trance. As you can see from this experiment, it is possible to induce hypnosis in people who continue to be wide awake and alert and who manifest none of the drowsy-like manifestations found in persons hypnotically induced through the normal fixation and relaxation techniques.

Other times, I would induce friends to walk on a sidewalk as if they were walking a the ledge of a building and in several cases, I was able to induce complete strangers walking beside me on a street, to later stand at a store window and stare at an object in the window and remain there, unable to move until several minutes had elapsed after I left them.

The secret is two-fold; trust and suggestibility. Of course, the subject must never know that he is being set up in such a manner that within minutes, he is going to be susceptible to suggestions that will to some extent, effect his thinking.

It is said that Adolph Hitler had the ability to hypnotize those who heard him speak. That is not as far fetched as one would think. The people of Germany were in desperate financial trouble. Inflation had deflated the Reich mark and unemployment was rampant. They were looking for a savior to bring prosperity to them. They needed a leader and it was this particular leader who had the uncanny ability to move people who heard him. It was unfortunate that he was such an evil man. Another man who also had this uncanny gift of persuasion was of course, Martin Luther King. Anyone who ever heard him speak, found themselves believing this great reformist, especially when he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave his I have a dream speech.

This form of hypnotism is performed on TV every Sunday when the religious performers do their seal acts begging for money. It must work because millions of listeners are mailing their hard earned money to the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts, just to name a few. Some people who attend ‘revivals’ and who are hypochondriacs who appear to be disabled, suddenly can walk again when the revivalist tells them that they can walk.

There is an interesting case in the annals of crime that bears retelling because it involves hypnosis and an attempt by a suspect to trick two medical hypnotists into believing that what he said while he was 'hypnotized' was in fact, true. It involves the case of the 'Hillside Stranglers'

Two cousins, Bianchi and Buono had abducted ten girls in the area of Los Angeles over a five-month period and brutally raped, tortured and then strangled them to death before discarding their victim's bodies in the hills surrounding that city and its environs. When Bianchi was arrested a year later for murdering two girls in Bellingham, Washington, he attempted to convince everyone that he had a duo personality. He claimed that he was Ken, the affectionate man who was kind and considerate and he was also Steve, who was vicious and a mean killer. He maintained that neither personality knew of the existence of the other. If he could convince the court that he had these two personalities, he could be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

That's when the trial judge decided to call in a Doctor Allison, a psychiatrist who is a renown expert on multiple personalities. The doctor concluded, after hypnotizing Bianchi, that the accused really had two personalities.

The prosecutor was convinced that Bianchi was faking and that he had clerverly maneuvered Dr. Allison into thinking that he really had two personalities. He was sure that if Bianchi could fool Dr. Allison into believing that he was insane, he could later fool other psychiatrists into believing that he was miraculously cured and as such, he would demand his freedom. He arranged for another psychiatrist and hypnotist, Dr. Orme, who was with the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, to study Bianchi.

Dr. Orme was familiar with the hallucinations experienced by subjects who were genuinely under a hypnotic trance so he decided to see if he could trick Bianchi into falling into a trap where it could then be proved that he really wasn't hypnotized. If he could prove this, then the court could assume that since he was faking his hypnotic trance, he was also faking his duo personalities. When you see how cleverly he maneuvered Bianchi into the trap, you can appreciate how a master hypnotist can make a fool out of a fake.

First the bait. He mentioned in passing to Bianchi, just prior to hypnotizing him, that it is rare in a case of multiple personality for there to be just two personalities. Then he hypnotized him. (or at least he let Bianchi believe that the doctor was convinced that Bianchi had been hypnotized.) No sooner was Bianchi in a trance, when he suddenly developed a third personality. His name was Billy. The doctor had tricked Bianchi of course. It is not rare at all for a person who is insane to have only two personalities. Such a person can have many personalities.

With Bianchi nibbling on the bait, the doctor began tantalize him in the hope that he would really sink his teeth into the bait. The doctor was talking to Ken, (the nice guy) and he introduced Ken to his lawyer, (who actually wasn't in the room) A person who is really hypnotized will see someone who really isn't there, if he has been programmed to accept the hallucination and he won't think that there is anything amiss. As to be expected, Ken shook hands with his absent lawyer. I say 'expected' because if Ken wasn't faking, he would see the absent lawyer and if he was faking, he would pretend to see the absent lawyer, so his actions were predictable. Ken sunk his teeth deeply into the bait.

Now comes the time when the doctor began reeling Bianchi in. He arranged for Bianchi's lawyer to enter the room while Bianchi was pretending to be talking with his hallucinated lawyer. Bianchi would actually see his lawyer enter the room because he had not been programmed not to. So in effect, he would be seeing two images of his lawyer---the imagined image and the real one. Now, to a person who is hypnotized into accepting the hallucination of his lawyer, it shouldn't come as a surprise that when the real lawyer enters the room, the subject will see him also. Bianchi looked at his lawyer and then asked the doctor, "How can I see him in two places?" A truly hypnotized subject doesn't question the existence of two of the same people since he accepts the illusion as being a valid one. When Bianchi asked that question, the doctor had in effect, pulled his 'fish' right out of the water.

Bianchi changed his plea to guilty and was then sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Later, it was learned that Bianchi had studied hypnosis and was familiar with the symptoms of hypnotic behaviour.

Perhaps I should tell you a bit about post-hypnotic suggestions. The word 'post' tells you that these hypnotic suggestions have been planted in the subject's mind previous to him acting on the hypnotic suggestion. I will never forget the first time I tried experimenting with post-hypnotic suggestions.

It happened in August of 1953. (I was still in the navy) Our ship, HMCS Ontario, a medium sized cruiser was visiting Vancouver and many of us were sleeping in the gymnasium at the small naval base in that city. I had been hypnotizing a couple of the men and when one of them was in a medium trance, I told him that when he woke up the next morning, he would stare out the window and not know where he was. He would spend at least an hour asking everyone where he was. If he did this, it would surely mean that he was acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion because he knew very well where he was before I hypnotized him since he spent most of his life in Vancouver and joined up at the very base were were at. The next morning, he did just what I hoped he would do. About an hour later, he began to realize where he was and was quite surprised about his behaviour.

After that, I conducted many post-hypnotic experiments but the one that gave me the most satisfaction was in 1953 when I was asked by an Army dentist to ready his patient for a major extraction involving the pulling of six of his teeth. Putting patients asleep for operations is relatively easy, but the problem facing me was that on the day of the operation, I would be in Los Angeles, nearly 1300 kilometers away. This meant that I had to hypnotize him four days prior to the operation and then hope that when he was operated on, he didn't suddenly come out of the trance.

I initially put him into a medium hypnotic trance in about five minutes and while he was in that state, I told him that on the following Monday at 9:00 a.m. he would sit in the dentist's chair and as soon as the dentist told him that he was to go to sleep, he would fall asleep and would not wake up until the dentist told him to wake up. Further, I told him that while he was asleep, he would feel no pain and that after he woke up, he would feel a numbness in his mouth for three days. On the day of the operation, the post-hypnotic suggestions were followed just as planned.

Believe it or not, that is not so difficult as it seems. When I originally hypnotized him, I conditioned his mind to accept the commands of the dentist, those commands being that the patient would fall asleep as soon as the dentist had told him to, and so forth. In fact, I could have had him sleeping in the dentist's chair without the dentist saying a word. As soon as the patient would sit in the chair, he would fall asleep if I had planted that suggestion in his mind.

It should be kept in mind however that I would not have succeeded in having the patient follow the instructions of the post-hypnotic suggestion if the patient was not consciously (and subsequently subconsciously) aware that it was necessary for him to have his teeth removed and that the hypnosis was a necessary part of the operation.

Many years ago, I knew a man whose tales of his exploits had me and his friends wondering whether or not he was really telling us the truth. One day I talked him into letting me hypnotize him. While he was in a trance, I had him open his eyes. I showed him a deck of cards and told him that when he saw the Ace of Spades, he was to deny that he had seen it. When he saw the Ace of Spades, he denied seeing it. Then while he was still under, I told him that I would show him the deck again and that when he lied to me about seeing the Ace of Spades, he would develop a tic (involuntary twitch) in his left eye. Sure enough, when the Ace of Spades showed up, the twitch began. I then told him that if he ever lied to anyone, his eye would begin twitching. I put him into a state of amnesia so that when he woke up, he wouldn't remember anything I told him. I told our mutual friends that I had observed that whenever our friend told a lie, his eye would twitch and for years, we used to smile at his twitching eye. Sometimes he would tell a whopper and his eye would be twitching so violently, it was as if a red-hot cinder had entered it.

There is nothing mysterious about this trick. The Russian scientist Pavlov used to do it with dogs. My friend is damn lucky I didn't put in the post-hypnotic suggestion that when he lied, he would start scratching his buttocks. He was such a liar, that as soon as he opened his mouth, the perpetual scratching of his buttocks would have made the Saint Vitus's Dance seem like a fox trot in comparison.

I wish to reiterate a previous observation. A normal law-abiding citizen cannot be hypnotized into committing a crime unless he or she is tricked into committing a crime by the hypnotist.

Further, let me clear up one myth about hypnosis. The smarter a subject is, the easier that person can be hypnotized. If someone is really stupid, it is almost impossible to hypnotize that person although on one occasion, I hypnotized a retarded child in a residential school for retarded children. How I was able to do it, I am not sure. Perhaps it was the flashing light that did it. Flashing lights do have an effect on people. Proof of that was established many years ago in France. Motorists when driving on a certain road in France began falling asleep at the wheel. Later the reason was discovered. Apparently hundreds of trees were planted at equal distances from one another on the side of the road and when the motorists were passing them, the sun was shining on the sides of their faces, intermittently, This had an effect on them that cause them to become drowsy and then placed them in a hypnotic state that resulted in them falling asleep at the wheel. The authorities realizing this then cut some of the trees down so that the sun didn't shine on the drivers in the same manner it did previously. No one fell asleep on that road while driving after than. This is why hypnotists often use a swinging watch or swinging light. I chose not to use either method but instead simply used my power of suggestion alone.

The next article will be on HYPNOTHERAPY Part 2

Hard Labour for Violent Criminals

The late Karl Menninger said in his book, The Crime of Punishment “The great secret, the deeply buried mystery of the apparent public apathy to crime and to proposals for better controlling crime, lies in the persistent wish for vengeance.” He recognized that we all have that natural desire to hurt back but that in our society, it simply isn't done openly.

When the reformers sold society their concepts of prison reform through rehabilitation of criminals, society went for it---only to later learn that rehabilitation in prison was a joke. When violent offenders and murderers were released because parole authorities presumed that they had been rehabilitated, and these same felons re-entered society again to maim and kill again and again, society lashed out at the reformers, calling them sob sisters and buffoons.

Imprisonment serves two useful purposes---the protection of society and as a deterrence; both general and specific. Punishment isn't meted out where the purpose of imprisonment alone is the protection of society. To do so, would be cruel. For example, if a person kills another as a direct result of mental illness, we may incarcerate him for life in order to protect society but we wouldn’t incarcerate him as a punishment notwithstanding being incarcerated is a form of punishment.

You cannot deter criminals without inflicting punishment. Incarceration by itself as a penalty is punishment which is awarded to wrongdoers and yet, mere incarceration alone is not a deterrent. I am speaking of losers who have no job, no family to support, no house to upkeep and no future. Their friends are for the most part, lowlife like themselves who don't care one iota for their fellow humans. These are the people to whom incarceration means three meals a day, a roof over their heads, a warm bed and friends of their own ilk to keep them company. If they serve one or ten years in prison, they have learned nothing from it because it costs them nothing. They had nothing when they went into prison and they have nothing when they re-enter society. To them, being sent to prison means little or nothing to them. They simply don't fear imprisonment; hence they commit more violent crimes. I remember meeting a middle-aged man who had spent years in prison and when he was released he immediately committed another burglary. When I asked him why, he said that it being winter, it was cold and he had no where to go and he was glad to be back into prison again. He is the kind of person we refer to as being institutionalized.

What about the 38-year-old woman in Toronto who was the victim of three teenage thugs who had nothing better to do? These thugs walked down the busy streets at the early hours of the morning, banging on the doors of cars that stopped at stop lights and assaulting anyone who protested. The 38-year-old woman who left her car to protest was stabbed by a 16-year-old punk in her abdomen and shoulder. The trial judge gave the 16-year-old youth a mere 18 months in a youth facility. With good time, he could be out in three months.

Can we expect a judge to give a slap on the wrist of the Toronto 16-year-old punk who stabbed a man who came to the assistance of this mother because his mother objected to drugs being sold in her neighbourhood? What penalty will some soft-hearted, soft-headed judge give to the criminal, who in the company of 20 youths, beat and stabbed a Rexdale man in the lobby of his own apartment building in the middle of the day after he had already given them his money?

Will the judge be anything like acting Justice Renee White in New York City, who after hearing evidence that an 18-year- old slashed a film actress across her cheek and ear for no apparent reason, promised the criminal who did it, that he wouldn't get any prison time if he behaved himself for a year? Is that what we call deterrence?

What is frightening is that a Canadian federal corrections report stated that 61% of all penitentiary inmates in Canada are psychopaths. Since such characteristics are formed in early life, it follows that young offender statistics are probably the same. A psychopath is anyone who has no feelings for anyone or anything and is incapable of really understanding the feelings of others. As an example of psychopathic behaviour, consider the two pre-teens in Toronto who poked the eyes out of a live kitten and then set the kitten on fire. It is these kinds of criminals that are in prison and young offender facilities for violent crimes and it is these kinds of criminals that eventually return to society with a vengeance. Admittedly, we have incarcerated them to protect ourselves from these beasts of prey but that protection is generally quite short in duration. The beasts are set free even while the victims continue to suffer.

What we need to do is to instill fear in the minds of violent criminals so that they know that if they commit an act of violence, they will pay not only the penalty involving their loss of freedom but also they will pay for their crimes with the pain of punishment.

Whipping went by the way years ago as a punishment for violent offenders (and rightly so because it was counter productive) so we are left with the only alternative suitable punishment that is acceptable---and that is, hard labour.

One thinks of the Gulag and Mississippi chain gangs when thinking of hard labour. That is hard labour in the extreme. What I envision as hard labour is a highly restrictive regimen of freedom and work in which the work hours are long and tedious.

I envision a section of each prison or young offender facility being set aside for violent offenders who are sentenced to hard labour. Such a section of each institution is a prison within a prison. Visits from family members are restricted to one two-hour visits per month. The prisoner (if over 15) works six days a week with one day being set aside (Sunday) as a day of rest and recreation. Smoking is absolutely forbidden---which in the long run, will be a blessing to the prisoner.

Each work day begins at five in the morning. The prisoner has one hour to get up, get washed and have breakfast. By six, he is at work. Between six and twelve noon, he has two 15-minute breaks. Between twelve and one, he has his lunch and a rest until one in the afternoon. Then he's back at work. He quits work at five with two 15-minute breaks in between. Between five and six, he has his supper and rest. At six, he is back to work again until eight. Between eight and nine, he has a shower, reads or writes and at nine, the lights go out.

The work is not light work. It entails loading and unloading heavy sacks of sand (the weight of each sack is dependant on the size of the offender which means that each sack can be half the weight of the offender) or digging holes, wheel-barrowing the dirt to another site and then returning to the original pile and filling the wheel barrows again. The work is monotonous and is not varied. The accomplishments are meaningless. The idea is to instill a hatred for their crime by instilling in them a hatred for the hard labour they are doing. It will certainly make legitimate work look like an outing in the summer.

For those who do their work without any trouble, they are given the privilege of enjoying their Sundays to the fullest. On Sundays, there will be TV to watch, a film, a concert by visiting performers and four-hour visits. They can play sports in the yards or simply lie in their beds. It's their day.

If they don't toe the line, they will spend their Sundays in solitary confinement with no privileges for that day. If they refuse to work, they will serve their time in solitary confinement with no books, no radio or TV. They will have no communication with anyone other than guards or by correspondence and their two meals a day will be so bland and repetitious that the desire to eat simply won’t be there other than to break the monotony. They will sleep on two blankets on the floor with a third blanket to cover them or use as a pillow when rolled up.

There are many who will say that young offenders should be taught a trade instead of doing meaningless hard labour. I disagree. Teaching violent offenders a trade isn't going to change their attitudes about committing violent crimes against innocent citizens. Many violent criminals learned a trade in prison and upon their release; they still committed violent crimes. If they are to be taught a trade, let them be taught a trade when they are on parole while living in a halfway house.

I am suggesting this kind of punishment for periods of between one year (for young offenders) and three years (for adult offenders) as an alternative to sending violent offenders to prison for periods of three to six years of ordinary imprisonment. The purpose is two-fold. The first being that this short and hard imprisonment will deter violent criminals far more than long and soft imprisonment ever will. Secondly, the cost of keeping a prisoner in a federal penitentiary for two years for example, is only $100,000 whereas keeping him in prison for six years is three times as much.

This proposal is not in my opinion, cruel and unusual punishment. If imprisonment is to be effective, it must deter and there is nothing like hard labour that will deter a violent offender. When violent punks serve between one and three years in a correctional institution at hard labour for wounding by shooting, slashing or kicking innocent victims who refuse to hand over their purses or shoes, the next time they see a victim with a purse or something they want for themselves, they will think of the thousands upon thousands of gunnysacks of sand they hoisted over their shoulders, or the tons of dirt they moved across the yard, hour after hour, day after day, month after month until the thought of pulling a gun or knife or using their boots on a prospective victim, will make them want to vomit.

I am so sick of reading about violent offenders who attack anyone that is still breathing and then getting either a slap or a kiss from a soft-hearted, soft-headed judge who has no idea whatsoever as to what it is really like to suffer pain and injury at the hands of a violent offender, an offender who doesn’t give a damn what he or she does to other people.

SHEP: The story of a dog

What follows is a true story. Years ago, my wife and I visited the grave of this incredible dog in Fort Benton, Montana and I was so fascinated at what I head about this famous dog, I subsequently wrote this story for an animal’s rights organization.

Fort Benton, Montana, straddles Highway 87, that lonely road which runs between Havre to the north and Great Falls to the south. Some will say, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that although Fort Benton is nevertheless a mere speck on the map of Montana; it does have an interesting past. It was on this site that the famed explorers, Lewis and Clark passed in June 1805 on their way to the Pacific. This town established in 1864, was an important river port on the Missouri River and the head of navigation for the westbound steamboats coming from St. Louis, right up to the middle of the Twentieth Century. These facts alone would not give Fort Benton world recognition, but something did. It was the dog.

From 1937 until 1942, a collie called Shep; put this small town in the world news, not because of his beauty; which he didn't possess in any case-nor because of some spectacular act of bravery, but rather because of his faithfulness to his master and friend. If perhaps you feel that faithfulness in a dog hardly merits world recognition, then read on and form your own opinion as to the virtue of faithfulness of animals.

Shep was owned by a sheepherder who had moved into Montana from the eastern seaboard to raise sheep. Shep and his master became fast and firm friends because there is a bond between a sheepherder and his dog. Both depend on each other for their livelihood and for companionship in the lonely hills. It was never discovered just how their friendship began but many a friendship, long, loyal and self-sacrificing, between a man and his dog, originate from an utterance of a kind word or the giving of a morsel of food to a hungry dog.

Then in August 1936, that bond between the two was forever severed. One of them died. Shep survived his master. He watched with sadness, the body of his friend being placed in a pine box and then trotted behind the vehicle that conveyed it to the train station. He stood by, heaviness in heart as he watched the men place the box into the baggage car. Shortly after the baggage car door was closed, the train slowly pulled out of the station, its whistle blowing mournfully like a dirge at a funeral. Shep raced along side the train until the pain in his heart could take no more. Then he returned to Fort Benton, perhaps to ponder his future.

Before the next train had arrived, from the direction the last one had proceeded. Shep was on the station platform awaiting its arrival. He was waiting for his friend to return. The dog had no way of knowing that his friend was on his way east to be buried by his family. However, when the train stopped, it didn't take long for Shep to realize that his friend wasn't on the train. As each day passed, he faithfully waited for each train's arrival so that he would be the first to greet his friend on his return to Fort Benton. The days went into weeks and the weeks went into months. Not a train slipped into Fort Benton that the dog wasn't there to greet it.

At first, no one really paid attention to the dog and when the station personnel finally did take notice, they threw stones at it to shoo it away. It is odd indeed when you realize that once a dog recognizes kindness from a human being, it takes more than stones to chase him away from others who resemble the one who originally showed him kindness.

As the months passed and the leaves of autumn changed their colours, Shep grew gaunt, his fur; a mere covering of skin and bones. Most if not all dogs can fare on their own but there has to be a motive to survive other than just staving off hunger alone. Shep managed to forage around the backs of restaurants and among the garbage bins but the eating of rotten meat is hardly suitable for a dog's diet. Besides, he needed to spend practically all of his time at the train station and that gave him little time for anything else.

The winters in the eastern half of Montana are not kind to men or beast, least of all to a homeless dog on the verge of starvation. Thousands of cattle die under the ‘big skies’ of Montana when the death winds carrying the freezing sleet begin blowing across the unprotected Great Plains of North America, of which Montana is a part.

Shep wasn't a dumb animal. He knew that he needed some protection from the freezing blasts of winter so he dug out a spot for himself under the station platform to ward off the freezing winds of winter. His diggings weren't really warm as warmth goes, but with what fur he still had covering his lean body, his meagre shelter under the platform kept him alive.

Throughout the cold and winter months, the dog waited for the arrival of each train as it pulled into the station. He would leave his shelter and stand on the platform; his body shaking from both the cold and the anticipation of greeting his long-absent friend---his eyes opened wide, to encompass the entire platform as the passengers got off the train. With the realization that his friend was not on the train, he would return to his shelter, or in the alternative, forage for more food. If it was the need for food that took him away from the diggings, his absence was short for he wouldn't take any chance of missing the one train that would carry his friend home.

By the time the warm breezes of spring caressed the area of Fort Benton, the townspeople and the station personnel had become gradually apprised of what the dog was doing there at their train station. Many of the townspeople admired Shep and recognized the dog's vigil for what it was. They, along with fifty sheepherders from around the country, wanted to adopt Shep and care for him. Dog homes in a couple of states offered to give him a home and a life he so richly deserved. The station master and his staff---who unofficially adopted Shep by this time, gently refused the kind offers of the many that wrote or came personally to make their requests.

Word spread of the lonely vigil from community to community and then from newspaper to newspaper until Shep's name and his vigil became a household name. Many who had collies, named their dogs Shep in hope that having that name would instill in their pets, that virtue that was instilled in the dog at Fort Benton.

Many of those wishing to adopt Shep didn't realize that when one adopts a dog, that person not only must except the responsibility of nurturing and caring for the animal, one must also be prepared to conform, to some extent, to the dog's will. To conform to Shep's will would be to recognize that the train station was not only a home to him---humble as it was---but it was also a post to which he could not leave lest he miss the one thing that was most important to him---to his existence---the meeting of his friend when he steps off the train.

As the story of his vigil spread, many of the passengers on the great Northern trains passing through Fort Benton, would get off and pet and caress the dog. Dining car stewards would bring him the choicest meats from their larders. During the cold nights of the winters that followed, he always had a warm room in the station for the asking. Hundreds driving through the area would make a side trip so they could get a glimpse of the most famous and loved dog in the country.

As the years progressed out of the depression and drought, it became clear to those who knew Shep; that he was leading the life he really wanted. Although his vigil was unfulfilled, he had more friends than a dog could ever have, he ate well and as to a place to stay, his home was satisfactory. And more importantly, at least to Shep, he was in the right place to meet his friend when he finally returned home.

None of the people who visited the dog really fathomed the feeling of gradual hopelessness that developed within the dog. One can be surrounded by a multitude of friends and still feel the agony of loneliness of the loss of a loved one for that loss can not be forgotten by accepting the caresses of many who wish to replace the one who is lost. Shep knew and understood the feelings of those around him for he had experienced these feelings before when he was with his friend but those feelings were not the same. To understand the loneliness of the living, one must go within and feel the beating of the heart. A faithful dog may not understand virtue because it may not understand its significance within its own being. It is only its outward behaviour which it displays that makes us aware of the existence of its virtue.

Understanding the needs of that lonely dog was important but this understanding only became fruitful when it was sustained by the sympathetic feeling of joy and sorrow---joy because the dog was surrounded by his many friends who loved and cared for him, and sorrow, because the purpose of his vigil had become apparent to all except Shep; that his vigil would be without fulfillment.

Many of those who visited that lonely dog recognized, as the rest of us do, that we receive love and devotion from a dog as well as others of our own kind; not just in proportion to our demands, sacrifices or needs, but also in proportion to our capacity to recognize the demands, sacrifices of the needs of the dog and others. Despite the kindness shown to Shep and the opportunities to lead a comfortable life in the surroundings of friends who loved him, he was prepared to forfeit it all in order that he would not forsake his friend. None could replace his friend and yet, had he given up his vigil, he might very well have found another friend he could attach himself to. But that was not to be his choice. Shep had learned the hard way, as most of us do, that true and loyal friendship is like life; the value of it is seldom appreciated until it is lost.

The war years emerged and engulfed the world into darkness. Perhaps the darkness of gloom which falls upon us at the highest state of adversity can be dissipated by that minute flicker of light that represents hope, valour, or simply the caring of one being for another. Any light in a void is many times better than no light at all.

Shep's story, which by now was told and retold around the world, was that flicker of light so many yearned for. Many who knew of Shep's plight made their own problems easier to bear. Human nature is such; that the spectacle of another being's suffering awakens even in the best of us, a subliminal feeling of pleasure which contains along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible appreciation that it is not we that are suffering the agony of that other being. For this reason, many were drawn to Shep.

Adversity not only draws people together, it also brings out that warmth in all of us, melting away the coldness we tend on occasion to show others, not unlike the early sun melting away last night's frost which has gathered on our window panes. Many of those who got to know Shep developed not only a friendship with the dog but also with others who shared their friendship with Shep.

For five and a half years, Shep kept his vigil. Not one train had passed that he hadn't personally greeted in the faint hope that at long last; he would finally meet the man who was the purpose of his vigil. Alas, the lonely vigil, along with his age---he was old when his friend passed away---had taken its toll. He was no longer agile and his hearing and eyesight had grown faint with his age.

On January 12, 1942, Shep saw the approaching train and dashed across the tracks so that he could be on the platform when it pulled in. The people smiled at each other as they watched the dog approaching them. They all knew who he was waiting for. Suddenly their faces turned to expressions of horror. Shep had stopped suddenly as train number 235 was bearing down on him. Perhaps he didn't hear the whistle or perhaps he didn't see the engine. His paws slipped on the icy cold rails. As he tried to regain his footing, the wheels of the engine crossed his body. body.

Hundreds of townspeople attended Shep's funeral. He was laid to rest on top of the small bluff overlooking the train station. There on the top of that bluff, he could wait for the trains, till the end of time. The Great Northern train employees erected a profile monument of their friend along with a concrete marker. The station personnel installed a spotlight on the station which when turned on, lit the grave site so that the passengers on the night trains can see the monument.

Often many people die believing that the Ages will pass by and no one will ever look upon their existence as being one of beauty or nobility. It is a strange anomaly of humans to ignore the admirable traits of the living and yet, later, praise the dead. Despite this strange quirk in our character, exceptions are made and Shep proved to be one of those exceptions. Those of his time may not have looked upon the dog as an object of beauty but no one missed the reality of his nobleness. The memory of Shep was not ignored by his friends nor has he been forgotten by those in the generations that followed.

His death occurred at a time when humanity was seen as being devoid of dignity and significance, seen as trivial and mean, having sunk to the depths of dreary hopelessness. Despite this, his death brought home to thousands around the world, the belief that if a dog could possess the admirable traits sought in humans, there was hope for all who recognized those traits in a dog.

I have heard it said that animals do not have a place in Heaven but I for one cannot fathom Heaven without animals who possess faithfulness and loyalty. If Shep did go to Heaven; I like to think that when he got there, he was greeted by his long-lost friend, who just like Shep, patiently waited for that eventful and beautiful meeting.

Women and Crime (Part 1)

What follows is an article that I wrote forty years ago for a police magazine. Alas, much hasn’t changed since then with respect to women criminals. WARNING: This article is not for those who are squeamish.

In October 1989, Ameenah Abdus-Salaam, a 32-year-old mother of two, pushed her 6-year old daughter and her 3-year-old son out of the window of their tenth-floor New York City apartment. Her daughter was killed and her son was critically wounded. Her motive? The mother was heard crying out to her children as they plunged downwards to the street below; "God is waiting for you."

Maria King, a Miami 32-year-old woman, the mother of four children-two girls and two boys, stabbed her two daughters, 4 and 3 years, to death, then she ordered her 8-year-old son to stab her to death which the unfortunate boy finally did. Her motive? She was angry with the girls.

In 1984, Shiela Smith, 26, and her lover, Ricky Irby, 29, both of Illinois, held their three-month-old son's nose closed and then poured sulfuric acid down the helpless baby's throat--something akin to shoving a red-hot poker down its throat. After suffering horribly, the baby died. Their motive? They wanted to sue a baby food company for product liability.

In October 1989, a Gulfport, Mississippi mother, Sylvia Payton, mixed ground glass with dry cereal and fed it to her 8-month-old daughter. Her motive? To lure her estranged husband back to their home.

I apologize to my readers for opening this article with these four heart-wrenching tales but I couldn't think of a more explicit way in which to bring to the attention of my readers, what they have just read, is an all too common occurrence in our present day and age. For the most part, it is mothers who kill their children rather than their fathers. It is not my intention however to explain why mothers kill their children in this particular article. Fortunately the killing of children by their mothers represents a small segment of crimes committed by women.

There has been a steady increase in female crime in the past twenty-five years. Women offenders doubled from seven percent to fourteen percent of all persons charged with Canadian Criminal Code offences. In 1965, forty-five percent of all charges against women were for property offences and by 1985; this proportion had increased to sixty percent. More than half of all women charged with Criminal Code offences in Canada were charged with theft and fraud.

The ratio between women and men offenders in 1985 for committing crimes of theft and fraud is as follows; theft by women, 40.4%, theft by men, 16.3%; fraud by women, 13.1%, fraud by men, 6.1%: It is only these two offences where the women exceed in numbers of offences over that of the men.

A typical theft charge is not unlike that which has been perpetrated by the 'Catwoman' of Atlanta. Since 1979 to 1989, this elusive Canadian was suspected of breaking into 50 homes of Atlanta through unlocked windows and doors and stealing as much as one million dollars worth of goods.

Another typical crime of theft is when a couple of women knock on someone's door and ask to use the phone or use the bathroom. While the owner is watching one of the visitors use the phone, or watching the other one waiting downstairs, the unwatched visitor is stealing jewelry etc.

Shoplifting is of course a very common offence committed by women who for the most part, are petty pilferers, and who on the spur of the moment, will slip something unseen into their large bags. There is quite a gap between them and the professional boosters who wear special clothes to conceal the stolen items as they walk from store to store.

Fraud is for the most part, a female crime and there are basically three kinds of fraud committed by women. The first kind is indeed the most insidious. I am speaking of female employees who are placed in positions of trust. A typical fraud by a female employee is similar to that of the middle-aged woman in Chicago who in 1972, was arrested and charged with embezzling $122,000 from her employers in a complicated scheme which involved phony bank accounts, non-existent vendor companies and never-made deliveries. She was an assistant purchasing agent with a large equipment supply firm and she made a decent salary at the time but she felt that she deserved more and since her requests for a raise were denied, she decided to give herself an increase in pay. I remember assisting a lawyer in Ontario who was defending a woman who was charged with embezzlement. After repeatedly being rebuffed when asking for a raise, she simply increased her pay anyhow and since she was the bookkeeper in charge of payroll, she got away with it for six months. She also got six months in jail for her crime.

Another kind of fraud involves the uttering of bad cheques. The women open bank accounts and then with little or no money in their accounts, they begin purchasing what they want with their worthless cheques.

And of course, there is the fortune teller kind of fraud perpetrated on uneducated and highly superstitious victims, such as the case of 19-year-old Samantha Demitro of Toronto who attempted to con a man out of $4,600 by telling him that he was under an evil curse and that it could be removed when he brought the money in a glass jar filled with water.

Women also have an aptitude for violence. There is no getting away from that fact. Women do not commit the large numbers of violent crimes that are committed by men but despite this, there is an increase in the number of violent crimes by women. In 1965, there were 1,176 Canadian women charged with violent crimes, in 1975, as many as 3,455 were charged and in 1985, the numbers jumped to 6,891.

In 1965, there were 22 women charged with murder or manslaughter. In 1975, the number dramatically jumped to 71 and in 1985, the number increased to 81. In 1965, as many as 1,006 women were charged with attempted murder, wounding or grievous assault. In 1975, the number had jumped to 2,942 and in 1985, the number made a dramatic leap to 6,168. It should be kept in mind that these figures are related to only three years in the twenty-year period. If the mean numbers were applied to each year and multiplied by twenty years, it could conceivably mean that as many as (3372 times 20 years) 67,440 Canadian women have been charged with murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, wounding or grievous bodily assault.

Often those women who commit the crimes of murder, manslaughter or attempted murderer, have themselves been victims of the very men they are charged with killing or attempting to kill. There have been incidences however where women have killed other women in a fit of jealousy such as the case of Kim Blinkhorn, 28, of Waterloo, Ontario who was charged with the murder of her 21-year-old rival who lived with their mutual boyfriend. Blinkhorn stabbed her rival 70 times while the victim's three-year-old daughter watched helplessly. Some, as previously noted, have killed their children in a fit of revenge and on several occasions, some have even killed their robbery victims.

It is no surprise to anyone that there are women who commit multiple murders. In September 1989, a 56-year-old woman in Burlington, North Carolina was arrested as a suspect in the deaths by arsenic poisoning, of as many as eight people. The victims include her former husband, boyfriends, a mother-in-law and her father. Of course, there has been no woman in recorded history that can match the murderous record of Countess Elizabeth Bathroy. It has been said that she had as many as 650 peasant girls murdered so that she could have her daily bath in their blood.

Some women of today are committing kinky murders, such as the four Australian lesbians in their early 20s, who in October 1989, lured a 47-year-old man to his death. They drank animal blood and then, while three of them held him down, the fourth stabbed him 14 times. In June, 1989, three Milwaukee women in their 20s were charged with the attempted axe murder of a 25-year-old man they lured to an apartment. They planned to dismember him and eat his kidneys.

Two lesbian nurse's aides, Gwendolyn Graham, 25 and Mary Wood, 27, of Walter, Michigan, were arrested in September 1989 for the murder of five patients in a nursing home. They smothered their victims to death in order to cement their lesbian relationship.

In December 1989, Lilianne Sella St. Couer, 33, of Montreal was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for smothering her 11-year-old daughter to death and trying to murder her other daughter and her husband.

Robbery by women is on the increase. In 1965, there were only 125 women charged with robbery, and the number jumped to 474 in 1985. This means that in the twenty-year period, there were conceivably as many as (333 times 20 years) 6660 robberies committed by women in the twenty-year period between 1965 and 1985. Of course, many of these women would have been working alongside their male counterparts but recently, there have been gangs of women committing muggings, purse snatching and other robberies on their own.

A number of mothers have been convicted of rape in the sense that they have permitted men to rape their children. In Allegan, Michigan, two mothers, Annette Sanford, 34 and Carolyn Wilson, 42, forced their six young children to have sex with various men over a three-year-period. One boy told the court that his mother forced him to have sex with six different men in one day alone. In Toronto, in 1989, three women lured a young man into a van and then at gunpoint, sexually assaulted him.

This kind of sexual deviancy is not rare in Canada when you consider that in 1985, as many as 168 women were convicted of rape and sexual assault. Admittedly, these figures pale when you consider that in the same year, as many as 7,120 men were convicted of the same offences but nevertheless, 168 is very high when you look at the figures for twenty years earlier. In 1965, only 23 women were convicted of those crimes.

Drunk driving charges are on the increase. In 1985, as many as 10,000 women were charged with impaired driving.

The criminality of so many women may be explained as a symptom of a sense of futility with a desperate life situation, such as poverty, homelessness and abuse. Further, in the past, crimes by women were less likely to be reported by police than crimes by men, and criminal justice officials, who were predominantly male, gave preferential treatment to women who came in contact with the law. But now, women are treated as equals (or at least they should be) and those who have a propensity to commit crimes, are finding themselves having to do time. This was brought out in a July 1, 1975 Globe and Mail story which was headlined, "Equality equals equal jail for pregnant woman."

A 1977 federal report brought this possibility to the fore when it said in part; "With the pressure for equality for the sexes, is coming reduced paternalism on the part of the police and the judiciary. This could lead to increased charges against women and longer sentences if convicted." It certainly has led to an attitude of police, prosecutors and judges alike that implies that if 'equality is what they want, then equality is what they'll get' even to the extent of giving them, equal time for equal crime. Of course, crimes by men are also on the upsweep.

With the police increasing their level of competence, it follows that more female criminals are being detected in their acts of criminality than before.

There is a belief by some, that as a result of women's lib, its impact has been felt by women offenders who are now being punished for their supposed acts of liberation. In August 7, 1975, the Toronto Star even went so far as to headline a story with, "Women's Lib linked to soaring crime." Others believe that the upsweep in female crime is the direct result of premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy, post partum depression and menopause. Others believe that many female criminals lack 'female' qualities and that the 'masculinization' of many women is the cause of the increase in female crime. In April 12, 1978, the Daily Mail in London, England, began a story with "A tough new breed of criminal is emerging---young women whose behaviour is increasingly masculine." Many years ago, I was invited to visit a woman’s prison and I was amazed at how many of the women prisoners were ‘butches’. (masculine lesbians) I don’t know if this was because judges were prone to sending them to prison more than non lesbian women.

Adolescent female crime is on the increase also. In the past, both teenage boys and girls were involved in minor criminal activity more or less equally, and yet the girls were less likely to be charged with criminal acts. The Young Offenders Act in Canada now makes it possible for the authorities to treat all youthful offenders equally. The prime reason is because under the previous Juvenile Delinquency Act, the young offenders were treated more or less as persons in need of help (Status Offenders) whereas the Young Offenders Act has the protection of society as one of its main aims. (Criminal Code Offenders)

Women are changing. They no longer expect to be treated as subservient beings to male masters and rightly so. Medical, educational, economic, political and technological advances have freed women from unwanted pregnancies, provided them with male occupational skills and proven to them that they have the ability to govern. Is it any wonder that when women learned to accept male responsibilities, they should strive for status in the criminal world as well? The question that we are forced to ask is not why women are surging so readily into crimes once dominated only by males, but rather, what has taken them so long to start? Crimes such as mugging, robbery, extortion, loan sharking, kidnapping, murder and especially terrorism, once the sole domain of males, are now being committed my women also.

Society must not look upon criminal women as mere wayward waifs who have gone astray. Many of these women are vicious killers who kill out of the need for power, revenge or for satanic purposes. Others are women who think nothing of sneaking into the homes of elderly people and hammering them unconscious while robbing them.

We, as a society, must accept the fact that female criminality is here to stay and if we want protection from female predators, then we must treat them no differently then we treat men who sink to the same levels of criminality. They must be treated just as harshly as their male compatriots in crime. Consider what the fate of Carletha Stewart, 22, should have been, who after being fired by a Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles, planned the robbery of the restaurant which resulted in four patrons and staff being murdered during the robbery. Consider the fate of Priscilla Ford, a former school teacher who deliberately ran down 29 persons on a sidewalk in Reno, Nevada, killing six of them. Consider the fate of Christine Falling, of Perry, Florida who not only murdered 3 children, she was also suspected of murdering her employer for his money.

Although women have inhabited the earth as long as men, benign and despotic paternalisms have made them something of a stranger to themselves. But like rivers diverted by dams and dykes from their original beds, the flood of liberation has carried them over the walls of servitude and into the male dominated plains of financial security and wellbeing. They are imitating men's roles because identification is the most expedient way to learn and to many of them, crime is the easiest lesson of all.