Ya gotta pause and reflect on the definition. Of course all people are capable of great good and great "bad". My experience has been that barring physical/organic issues, the right kinds of experience can shift the worst individual from "bad" to good. But what that experience would have to be is an interesting and broad study. Just getting some kind of a valuable product can work wonders for some folks, while others need to dig into past traumas or confess their lifetime's crimes in order to break out of dramatizing harm toward others. Some people respond well to simple sensitivity training of one kind or another, others just need to be told they are appreciated, and some have deep-seated mechanism they have no notion of and need hours of therapeutic address to sort it out.

One thing I do not think highly of is the widespread use of chemistry to modify behavior which is deemed unacceptable by narrow standards -- for example, consider the fact that in the West we are feeding our overactive minds over 30,000 pounds of Ritalin a year! This dependency on Ritalin, Prozac and other forms of chemical intervention is a practice that has gotten (to my way of thinking) out of reasonable use and become a risky fad. It is so easy to prescribe a pill, and so labor-intensive to exercise communication skills, that you can see why it has become popular. But it has really ugly premises behind it, as a widespread solution -- if you don't like their behavior, drug the buggers! That'll make 'em tractable. I also believe that if a behavioral condition has personal, experiential and cognitive sources, that burying it with psychopharmaceutical cures is no cure at all -- it just defers the pain and buries it deeper where it is likely to eventually explode. I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway's response to electro-convulsive therapy, which he was given because he suffered from depression. The unwanted side effect of memory loss, which ruined his writing skills, made him more depressed than ever, and he ended up putting a shotgum in his mouth and blowing his head open, as I understand it. Some argument for ECT; and on a less dramatic note, using chemicals to make bad people act good is a similar tragedy in the making, in my NSHO.

Regards,

A