"I like to help others," L. Ron Hubbard once wrote, "and count it as my greatest pleasure in life to see a person free himself of the shadows which darken his days."

That purpose was the reason for more than half a century of research into methods to improve the human condition.

Most important to Mr. Hubbard throughout his research was to achieve a workable solution to the problems of ethics, always searching for a methodology that would produce consistent and uniform results.

From the start, Mr. Hubbard had seen the effects of criminal behavior from the top down and from the bottom up. After witnessing the execution of a prisoner, he realized that killing a man was not justice, but merely a type of revenge. It was not a solution. Nor did locking a person away for life solve the problem. In his own words, "All one learns in a cage is that he has indeed become an animal."

Continuing to search for the one common denominator that marked anyone's start of a career in crime, Mr. Hubbard found that the loss of self-respect is what brought about any life of lawlessness and criminality.

To remedy this, Mr. Hubbard developed the workable methodology which is available today in the Criminon program.