Criminon

In 1997, Judge Stephen Rushing, a Pinellas County, Florida judge received criticism and raised eyebrows from other judges when he began sentencing defendants to a program called "Impulse Control" that was run by Criminon. Rushing said the people running the course promised they would not try to convert anyone. However, the paper noted that many critics have suggested that Criminon was being used as a recruiting tool. Rushing stated that if the program turned out to be nothing but a ploy to promote Scientology, "I owe an apology to the people I put in that program."

Criminon has also been criticized for promoting Scientology's hostile view of psychiatry. A Criminon instruction manual found at California's Corcoran Prison in 2005 instructs the supervisors who are supposed to be helping the inmates to encourage them to stop taking any psychiatric medication: "Most jails and prisons have a staff psychiatrist that goes in daily and gives dosages of various and sundry mind-altering drugs to the inmates. Most of the time this is a ploy to keep the inmates sedated so that they don't cause trouble." While Criminon claimed that this manual was "outdated", the replacement manual still advised that if inmates seemed angry, it may be because "some of them are on psychiatric drugs and have strange side effects as a result." Professor Stephen A. Kent says "[Scientology's goal] is to destroy psychiatry and replace it with Scientology's own treatments. Criminon is simply one of many Scientology organizations that hope to see this goal realized."

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