Inside the criminal mi
CRIMe — the worse, the better — fascinates us. the eternal appeal of novels devoted to this topic attests to that. But they are make-believe.
For anyone interested in the real world of criminals and the criminal mind, there is no more essential writer than theodore Dalrymple.
that is a pseudonym, and necessarily so. For the author was a prison psychiatrist for decades, chiefly in Birmingham, and it would have led to his immediate sacking if he had been identified.
In fact, Dalrymple performs a national service by revealing — with cold, precise rage — the follies of the bureaucracy that envelops our penal system.
And while he has been accused of exploiting the criminals under his charge for literary gain, it is only the authorities who have something to fear from his pen.
the (disguised) criminals in his accounts, it is true, are characterised by a pathological inability to take responsibility for their actions. hence the book’s title, the Knife Went In.
one prisoner, on remand for murder, tells Dalrymple: ‘A fight broke out, a gun arrived, I accidentally took it and it went off.’
As Dalrymple points out: ‘the only human action that he admitted to was the accidental discharge of the gun, by happy chance killing an enemy.’
Part of this must have been the as yet unconvicted killer preparing the grounds for his not guilty plea.
But it is much more than that: criminals are frequently the best examples of nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Memory says “I did that”. Pride replies “I could not have done that”. eventually memory yields.’
In this spirit, another of Dalrymple’s patients, inside for throwing acid in the face of his then girlfriend, tells the good doctor that he couldn’t have done it — because he did not remember having done it. ‘I asked him my usual question: “how, then, do you know that you didn’t do it?” “Because I don’t do them things.”
‘In other words, he knew he didn’t do it, because it wasn’t the type of thing he did, even if he could not say exactly what he was doing at the time in question.’
Sometime later, Dalrymple asks the man if he had ever been in prison before: ‘ “Yes,” he replied. “What for?” “I threw ammonia in a girl’s face.” ’
this is the blackest of black humour: and if you like that sort of thing, Dalrymple is the master. Some might feel it is unethical to make fun of what were, after all, his patients.
But I suspect that the criminals themselves might actually have preferred dealing with a shrink who didn’t envelop them with the officially approved jargon, but was completely unguarded and direct.
Like the prisoner, serving the latest of many stretches for burglary, ‘who asked me whether I thought that his continual resort to burglary had something to do with his childhood. “Absolutely nothing whatever,” I