DEI for Inmates

An author and former prison inmate connects the dots between criminality, personality disorders, and social justice fundamentalism.

Podcaster Michael Liebowitz is a former prison inmate. He did his crime and did the time. Then he wrote a book about his experience called View from a Cage: My Transformation from Convict to Crusader for Liberty.

You might say Liebowitz became a resident expert on prison inmates. He has also become an advocate for the incarcerated, as well as for the morality of human freedom and personal responsibility.

Relatedly, Liebowitz reached out to me after reading a piece you might have seen:

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The piece resonated with Liebowitz because he’d discovered that so many of the prison population seemed to suffer from various aspects of the so-called “Dark Tetrad,” a cluster of personality disorders found in the DSM series, the diagnostic criteria for psychologists. Interestingly, Michael Shellenberger recently associated this cluster with the worst avatars of social justice fundamentalism.

Now, during Liebowitz’s time in lockup, he noticed that some of the inmates were getting certain types of messages in their reentry/rehabilitation programs:

• You’re a victim of circumstances.

• You had no chance in white supremacy culture.

• Your interaction with the justice system is probably unjust.

You might have heard these messages referred to variously as DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We all worry about what this is doing to schoolchildren. Now think about what kind of toxic result is likely to come out of decades of indoctrinating criminals with such messages, particularly if the Michaels (Liebowitz and Shellenberger) are right in connecting the dots between personality disorders, criminal behavior, and social justice fundamentalism.

Add a few Soros DAs, and you’ve got…

In this conversation, Liebowitz and I review some of the ideas in “Cognitive Distortion as Radical Social Justice” and discuss his experience studying—both firsthand and in the literature—the psychology of prisoners, the problem of stripping criminals of personal responsibility, and the massively unwise movement to steep intersectional inmates in the ideology of victimhood.