From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: sci.med,talk.politics
Subject: Crime and Hormones and Illegal drugs (was: Re: well, what do you 
	know?--headers trimmed)
Date: 10 Sep 1998 07:03:05 GMT

In <35F7607C.98AA8B52@pacbell.net> droyaldc <droyaldc@pacbell.net>
writes:

>As I recall the late Dr. Leary, while heading the psych department at
>Harvard, conducted experiments at a prison with a horrible recidivism
>rate.  The experiments consisted of counselling, in a group therapy
>format, with prison inmates with the goal of reducing recidivism. These
>therapy sessions were augmented with the careful administration of
>psychotropic pharmaceuticals i.e. LSD 25.  The results were both striking
>and dramatic:  recidivism reduced from around 90 percent to around 40
>percent in a matter of weeks to months.
>
>I'm not certian of the details but i'm quite certain that the essentials
>are as I have stated.  Too bad he's not here to enlighten us on the
>thought process and the techniques.  Too bad also that he took blame for
>reckless use which seems to me to have been Kesey's work much more so
>than Leary's
>dcr


   Leary had problems in that he didn't publish, and with LSD it's also
very difficult to do blinded experiments.

    Leary also developed a psychological test (instrument) which
acurately predicted the chance that a person would be violent in prison
or try to escape.  When he was finally imprisoned himself, for being
caught with some marijuana, they gave him his own test, not knowning
who had written it.  Leary, wisely, didn't tell them.  Instead he
answered it all to make himself look like the model prisoner, and got
assigned to a low security institution, from which he promptly escaped.
This is a story I love.

   Eventually they recaught him, and this time they put him in the
dungeon, in felon "max."  Sometime later, another incident occured
which I also love, and loved to hear Leary tell.  Carl Sagan, just then
becoming the apostle of astronomy, was arguing against manned missions,
and manned space flight in general, which ate up money available for
planetary robotic probes (Sagan would later change his mind, but at the
time was vehement that man should not leave Earth until he'd cleaned it
up).  Leary had written a book extolling the virtues of space travel,
and Sagan set out to put his head straight.  It didn't matter that
Leary was in prison: Sagan went to see him.  At the time, Juan Corona
in the same prison had started some riots, and all prisoners in max
were in their cells, chained to the wall.  So Sagan visits Leary and
finds him in a cell, chained up.  "Now Tim," he says earnestly, "tell
me again why you'd want to leave this Earth..."  Leary pulls up the
chains: "Say what??"

                                      Steve Harris