The Successful Treatment of a Habitual Criminal

TLDR: ROLF as discussed by the authors is an outstanding example of a rehabilitated criminal who started as a juvenile delinquent at the age of eight, spent much of his early life in institutions, graduated to increasingly serious crimes with longer prison sentences, and has now lived a life free from crime for over six years.

Abstract: ROLF is an outstanding example of a rehabilitated criminal. He -t~L started as a juvenile delinquent at the age of eight, spent much of his early life in institutions, graduated to increasingly serious crimes with longer prison sentences. He has now lived a life free from crime for over six years, is married and successful in his work. This has been achieved by psychotherapy, by the socialising influences of people around him and by various life experiences which reacted on him to change his self-image and his life style. His life history illuminates these various factors: Rolf spent his first five years in a children’s home. His father was posted as missing during the war, his mother had become wayward; she was a primitive and promiscuous prostitute, served several prison sentences for theft and neglected the children, who soon started to thieve themselves. Her second husband, who was a notorious alcoholic, attacked her on several occasions with a knife and threatened to kill everybody round him. Rolf’s grandfather attacked him and his step-sister sexually. Rolf was average at school. He was ostracised by the other boys as a &dquo;Pole&dquo; (because his mother was a refugee from Upper Silesia) and sometimes beaten up. He ran away again and again, at first on foot, later taking the train without paying his fare, travelling to various big cities hundreds of kilometers away. In 1955, at the age of eleven, he was sent to a children’s home on the Lake of Starnberg. He was happy there, but later reverted to his vagrant life, became a thief and had some homosexual experiences. In 1956 he was sent to an educational institution at Landheim. He again continued to run away and stole when at liberty, as his mother did, but also the thefts enabled him to buy friends and gain prestige. In 1958 he spent eight weeks in a mental hospital, where he had a warm but brief relation with the woman psychiatrist who was ready