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they did and stop doing it. Of course, I’m oversimplifying here, trying to state things in layman’s terms, and I should add that we are professionals, after all, who are trained in behavioral methodology including remorse, but also a lot more—if you’re interested, read “Principles of Deductive Repentance,” by Morse and Frain, or Professor Frain’s excellent “Failure and Fault: Assignment and Acceptance. ”
    I did my training under Frain and graduated in 1976, just as remorse was coming to the forefront. People in the helping professions had begun to notice a dramatic increase in the number of clients who did terrible things and didn’t feel one bit sorry. It was an utterly common phenomenon for a man who had been apprehended after months of senseless carnage to look at a social worker or psychologist with an expression of mild dismay and say, “Hey, I know what you’re thinking, but that wasn’t me out there, it wasn’t like me at all. I’m a caring type of guy. Anyway, it’s over now, it’s done, and I got to get on with my own life, you know,” as if he had only been unkind or unsupportive of his victims and not dismembered them and stuffed them into mailboxes. This was not the “cold-blooded” or “hardened” criminal but, rather, a cheerful, self-accepting one, who looked on his crime as “something that happened” and had a theory to explain it.
    â€œI’m thinking it was a nutritional thing,” one mass murderer remarked to me in 1978. “I was feeling down that day. I’d been doing a lot of deep-fried foods, and I was going to get a multi-vitamin out of the medicine chest when I noticed all those old ladies in the park and—well, one thing just led to another. I’ve completely changed my food intake since then. I really feel good now. I know I’m never going to let myself get in that type of situation again!”
    It wasn’t only vicious criminals who didn’t feel sorry, though. It was a regretless time all around. Your own best friend might spill a glass of red wine on your new white sofa and immediately explain it—no spontaneous shame and embarrassment, just “Oh, I’ve always had poor motor skills,” or “You distracted me with your comment about Bolivia.” People walked in and stole your shoes, they trashed your lawn and bullied your children and blasted the neighborhood with powerful tape machines at 4:00 A.M. and got stone drunk and cruised through red lights, smashing your car and ruining your life for the next six months, and if you confronted them about these actions they told you about a particularly upsetting life-experience they’d gone through recently, such as condemnation, that caused them to do it.
    In 1976, a major Protestant denomination narrowly defeated an attempt to destigmatize the Prayer of Confession by removing from it all guilt or guilt-oriented references: “Lord, we approach Thy Throne of Grace, having committed acts which, we do heartily acknowledge, must be very difficult for Thee to understand. Nevertheless, we do beseech Thee to postpone judgment and to give Thy faithful servants the benefit of the doubt until such time as we are able to answer all Thy questions fully and clear our reputations in Heaven.”
    It was lack of remorse among criminals, though, that aroused public outrage, and suddenly we few professionals in the field were under terrible pressure to have full-fledged remorse programs in place in weeks, even days. City Hall was on the phone, demanding to see miscreants slumped in courtrooms, weeping, shielding their faces while led off to jail.
    Fine, I said. Give me full funding to hire a staff and I’ll give you a remorse program you can be proud of. Mitch sneered. “Ha!” he said. He said, “Get this straight, showboat, ’cause I’ll only say it once. You work for me, and I say