No discussion of The Way to Happiness would be complete without a word regarding the criminal reform program utilizing that booklet. Known as Criminon (without crime), this program is further based upon Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries on the cause and prevention of crime as determined through the course of his own work as a Special Officer of the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1940s. “If you want to rehabilitate a criminal,” he had written, “just go back and find out when he did lose his personal pride. Rehabilitate that one point and you don’t have a criminal anymore.” With Mr. Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness and key principles from Scientology, Criminon accomplishes just that.

Again the program is unique. Like Narconon, it relies upon no drugs or punitive restraints, but rather appeals to what Mr. Hubbard described as the basic goodness within all men. If such an approach seems unlikely among hardened criminals, the results speak for themselves. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Criminon runs programs in more than 2,000 prisons and penal institutions across 35 nations. Thus far, better than 100,000 inmates have successfully participated in the programs and have embarked upon new, crime-free lives without the normal recidivism.

In one juvenile program alone where 80 percent of the young offenders were routinely rearrested, a Criminon regimen utterly reversed the trend. That is, 90 percent of those completing The Way to Happiness Course were not rearrested. It was not for nothing, then, that Chief Probation Officer, Daniel O. Black of the Butler County Juvenile Court in Greenville, Alabama, concluded: “The Juvenile Justice System is in great need of a workable community-based first step program. The Way to Happiness fills that void. We start with basics: a good moral foundation based on honesty, integrity and trust; that is The Way to Happiness.”

That is also, in essence, the totality of everything L. Ron Hubbard stood for in the name of humanity. True, this world is faced with a moral, criminal and biochemical crisis the likes of which history has never known. True, too, annual statistics suggest only bleaker years to come. But for all his failings, his violence and degradation, declared Mr. Hubbard, Man is nonetheless basically good; and so, he further tells us, “Wherever Man strives, wherever he works, whatever he does, the good he does outweighs the evil.”