Once people are aware of my work, at some point the question ‘Have you ever met anyone that you thought was truly evil?’ will be asked. My confident answer often surprises and on occasions causes anger. No. In the 40 years plus span of my work with prisoners and with offenders in the community, not even one of them have I experienced as evil.
Truth is, in my lifetime, I have only met one person who I would describe as manifestly evil, and that person was not a prisoner they were a professional who worked in a prison. In that person, I witnessed over time a level of malevolence, intended cruelty, destructiveness, and cunning all operating in the service of her own highly toxic self. I did not experience this person as ill, or as personality disordered. I could not recognise a pathological issue; it was what I can only describe as a spiritual issue. I would never wish to encounter it again.
I have of course met many people who have carried out immense destruction and inflicted immense suffering. No matter how the media and others choose to label them, I have always been able to find genuine pathology, genuine deprivation (often not material) and a myriad of inhumane experience that has been repeated and re-enacted within the context of their crimes.
Often, when what has been done to someone is so horrific it cannot be put it words, then it is nearly always communicated by action, by behaviour. So precise at times is this re-enactment that even the smallest of facts are included. For example, when assessing evidence of those who have committed repeated acts of sexual crime against children, it’s not unusual for their victims to be a direct mirror of themselves at the age of their own victim experience. The crimes themselves taking place at the same time of day, month, week as that of their own victim experience and with the choice of victim looking as they themselves looked at that age. What the unconscious stores and then repeats is indeed often horrific, but it is seldom evil.
Enactment of the crime in question can also manifest in the forensic setting with me. Some years ago, I was interviewing a man who had committed a series of sexual assaults against people responsible for caring for him. Due to a ‘disability’ he claimed he needed help when going to the toilet. Once he got his carer into the confined space of the bathroom, in an aroused state he would expose himself to them and force contact with his penis. Halfway through my interview with him, he said he needed to use the toilet and would need me to assist him. Despite being in the middle of recording a graphic account is his offending, I got up and proceeded to help him to the bathroom. It was only as I was about to go through the bathroom door with him did a consciously realise what was happening and was able to stop the process at that point. Interestingly, he was able to completely manage going to the toilet without any assistance at all. This experience was a powerful learning of just how possible it is to be rendered unconscious and taken into someone’s repeated enactment. It then came as no surprise to me when, later in that same interview, the man disclosed for the first time that when a child he had been repeatedly sexually assaulted in the confines of a bathroom, where no one came to help him.
My experience is not that rare in forensic clinical settings. Unconscious dynamics get repeated in one way or another all the time. You can feel it, sense it and as described, sometime actually get drawn into it. Unsettling as it may be, I have never experienced this as evil, but more so deeply human. A reminder that we are all vulnerable to unconscious repetition, especially when we are not able to think about something.
Evil, the works of Satan, spiritual attack and spiritual warfare are most certainly not uncommon to me. But I have seldom experienced those things in my contact with the criminally convicted.
The follow-on question I’m often asked from ‘have you ever met an evil person? is usually about fear. Do you ever feel frightened when meeting people have raped and murdered? No, those who have murdered and done similar terribleness seldom induced fear in me. Truth is more likely; I have often been able to see myself in them and on many occasions totally understand why they have done what they have done. In fact, many surprise me that they have never done worse.
But referring back to that one evil person I met. The one who was a professional working in a prison. That person was a totally different experience and devoid at every level of any goodness. So yes, I have met with evil, just not as often as people would expect or like to think.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
