Almost fifty years ago I started working in retarded homes. Since our problem as non-medicals was behavior rather than treatment, the first thing we learned was the very practical difference between the Mildly Retarded and the Severely Retarded.

Severely Retarded were almost invariably very easy to deal with. They were children of upper income people who took good care of them but had to send them to our institution.

Theory would have screamed bloody murder at this statement, of course, but we had a day to day job to do, and it worked.

The mildly retarded were generally trash who had low IQs simply as a result of their place on the Bell Curve. They tended to be short, rude, cumbersome and all the other things that go with what is simply a bad set of genes.

Like the rules you pick up working in a prison, this one was little spoken of even then. My brother was a pediatric neurologist and I had already done plenty of research with him, so he leveled with me on this. from day one. Most workers have to learn it.

Most workers have to spend their first year or so mistreating severely retarded kids who would love to behave well and be given constant, patient instruction, and letting Mildly Retarded Trash cause mayhem.

Such is the cost of Social Progress.

By now they may separate the mildly from the severely more, so workers are no longer familiar with this particular difference. But they are surely screwing something else just as critical in the name of Marx … oops. I mean Political Correctness.

I wonder if ALL the new prison psychologists are still a joke? My doctor brother did his two years of Federal service in the Public Health Service as a doctor in Federal prisons, and a lot of his research in State facilities.

He was so popular with the inmates that when he left Atlanta, they gave him a framed (?) certificate officially naming him a Honorary Ex-Convict.

A warden told me I got along amazingly well with the inmates, too, though I am not sure that was intended entirely as flattery. He kind of hinted I should feel at home there.

Having to learn for oneself the different behavior patterns of severely and mildly retarded children was the most obvious sign of the Marx… I mean Politically Correct doctrine at retarded homes. I don’t know about now, but back then the most obvious sign when you worked in a prison was the New Psychologist.

They were the clowns of a Big House where there was very little entertainment. A New Psychologist or Psychiatrist was a private show for everybody.

Prisoners would find out a guy was recently out of school and joy would rain. They would vie for “how much sh** they could pack up his a** “ — Emily Post doesn’t have a lot of readers there.

Each one would tell the new psychologist a tale that made the Count of Monte Cristo look like a villain, and after five to eight years of unbroken indoctrination from Mommy Professor, the New Psychologist believed every single word of everything they said!

It took YEARS for each New Psychologist to learn that prisoners LIE!