After rising in the dark, Samantha Stein would dress quietly in her work clothes. Careful not to wake her three children, she would leave her San Francisco home in a shirt, blazer and smart trousers – calling it her ‘forensic psychologist uniform which doubled as an emotional barricade’.
Samantha would then drive long distances to one of California’s prisons or psychiatric hospitals where she would spend hours in the company of some of the state’s most dangerous offenders.
As a forensic psychologist, Samantha’s role was to decide whether men who had committed serious sexual offences should be set free once their sentence was up, or locked up indefinitely in a mental institution, a rite bestowed on the state under the controversial Sexually Violent Predator Act.
‘It was emotionally challenging to be exposed to the worst of what human beings can do to each other,’ Samantha, 57, tells Metro over Zoom.
Most of the men she met had an appearance that would belie their rap sheet; they looked ordinary, were well-behaved and polite. ‘A man rarely looks like his prison records,’ she explains.
Samantha began working with this unique group in 1997 when, training to become a therapist, she worked in groups rehabilitating sex offenders. It was a tough, but rewarding job and in 2006, she took her expertise into evaluation, where she was tasked with deciding whether a man is too dangerous to live in the community.
Her first trip to a prison surprised her. ‘I wasn’t expecting to be walking amongst incarcerated people. I assumed that [the prisoners] would either be in their cells or locked away somewhere
‘The older prisons were noisy, overcrowded, depressing and rough and there was a feeling of confinement and misery that I didn’t want to take home with me,’ she remembers.
As part of the role, Samantha evaluated child molesters, psychopaths and multiple offenders. She spoke to one man who severely beat a fellow student at high school ‘just because he was curious what it would be like’ before going on to rape a woman until she vomited. When Samantha brought the incident up, he laughed and dismissed it as a lie.
Another time she spoke to another offender who, aged 17, broke into a woman’s home, removed her baby from her sleeping arms and tried to rape her while threatening to kill her.
Even more disturbingly, one multiple offender ‘James’ used their interview to boast about his sexual veracity before stimulating himself in front of her.
‘It was a little scary, but more of what I felt was anger, and certainly it was shocking. It spoke to his level of impulsivity around sexuality, which made the decision that he met the [indefinite incarceration] criteria easier. This was not somebody who had control over their sexual behaviour,’ Samantha remembers.
However, for other men who had served their sentences, Samantha had to get it right, or risk their liberty indefinitely. It was a tough call.
She carried out 120 evaluations during that 18-month period; of these only 10% met the criteria for indefinite hospitalisation. She has since published a book, Evil At Our Table: Inside the Minds of the Monsters Who Live Among Us, about the difficult decisions she had to make.
There were times Samantha felt vulnerable in the prison; knowing that there would be a gap between the time she pressed her buzzer and the arrival of a guard. One lone evening meeting with a six-time rapist left her feeling scared – but she was never physically harmed.
‘Fortunately most of them were on their best behaviour for me, because they didn’t want to be indefinitely locked up.’
The psychologist explains how she would enter each new meeting with a healthy amount of scepticism; careful not to be manipulated. ‘There were times when I was pulled emotionally in one way or another and that didn’t stop me from making the decision that needed to be made,’ she recalls.
While it didn’t affect her trust in humanity, it did give Samantha a good view of what people are capable of. She met people whose crimes were just too appalling to write about in the book and she has seen police reports and photographs that she has never spoken to anybody outside of her work for fear of traumatising them.
‘There was somebody who had two rapes on their record during house break-ins. And because he became so comfortable with me during the interview, he admitted to having done it 30 times. That really stuck with me, because I thought – wow, if I can get somebody to admit that, then certainly I should keep doing it like I’m doing.’
After long, depressing hours in the prison, returning home to her three children and loving husband could be tough; Samantha didn’t want to sully her happy home life with the disturbing and distressing things she’d been dealing with at work.
She leant heavily on yoga, meditation and ordinary routines like family dinners to shake off the day. And the first thing she did on arriving home was get changed into comfy clothes.
‘Even as I was driving home I would be thinking about the cases, so as I got close to the house, I would make a conscious decision to leave that outside. But there was now a way to shut the door completely.’
Eventually, the job got to her. Samantha lived with nightmares and had to navigate a dark and depressing career while bringing up her three children in a world that she didn’t want to present as a dangerous place.
‘It’s hard not to feel shocked at the sheer volume of sex offences, and of men committing these kinds of crimes. It created a feeling of generalised danger that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily have,’ she explains.
After 18 months and on the verge of burnout, Samantha made the difficult decision to put an end to the role.
‘I felt like there was too much darkness and that I needed to do something more hopeful and positive with my time’, she explains.
Yet she feels proud of the work that she did. And despite the fact that she admits she has stripped citizens of their rights, Samantha also believes she has made society a little safer.
‘I would see people who most would write off as a hardened criminal, who needs to be locked up forever and forgotten about, turn into somebody who really makes an effort to be different in the world. That is inspiring, and it made me also feel like I was doing prevention work, something positive,’ she says.
‘When you change the life of someone who is a violent criminal, you not only change that person’s life, but all of the potential lives that they interact with. That did make the work very rewarding for me. We need to understand these people as human beings, not monsters, in order for true prevention to happen.’
● Evil At Our Table: Inside the Minds of the Monsters Who Live Among Us is out now