The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

A trauma-informed legal system would not justify or excuse harmful behavior. Rather, it would replace nakedly punitive measures with programs designed to rehabilitate people and not to further traumatize them. “All us criminals start out as normal people just like anyone else, but then things happen in life that tear us apart, that make us into something capable of hurting other people,” writes the academic and former inmate Jesse Thistle. “That’s all any of the darkness really is. Love gone bad. We’re just broken-hearted people hurt by life.”[7] “Unlike in some other countries, here prison is not designed to rehabilitate you,” he told me. “It’s designed to mess you up so that you’ll continue with high rates of recidivism, that’s what I think.”