A neat correlation

So I am reading this book called "He Leadeth Me" right now by a Jesuit priest who spent many years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union in the years following WWII. He talks here about his experience with crimminals. Make a few subsitutions into this passage and you're talking about my current experience.

The criminal world, the criminal mind, was something entirely new to me. It was at once horrifying and yet fascinating. For the first time I palpably experienced the power of evil and how completely it could overshadow the power of good. Good men, under the circumstances, were simply no match for those who would lie, steal, bully, beat, curse, or even kill without scruple. A man would have to give up everything that was best in him, descend to the level of animal instinct and passion and hate, in order to compete with these men or respond in kind. And even then he would be no match for them in raw physical violence or brutality. For these men were held back by nothing, they felt no restraint, they had grown accustomed to a jungle where the strongest and most savage ruled and the weaker managed to survive by unprincipled cunning. And what they did, they did openly. They were secure and unchallenged in the world they inhabited, a world with its own codes and rules and values as absolute as any “code of morality” ever devised. Yet totally perverted.

As I lived with men like these during the long years in the prison camps, I slowly learned that such initial impressions were not altogether accurate. Little by little, I came to understand that underneath their violent exterior and twisted moral code these criminals were men, too; men driven by fear, perhaps more so that most men, but still men nonetheless. Like all men they had had their share of hopes once; like all me they could be haunted still by memories- of family, of loved ones, of better times now lost, of opportunities missed. In a sense, they were men banded together in a world of their own out of the same basic drive men feel, out of the same need for a sense of belonging and of security, out of the same need to share a common goal and set of values- though for them this often meant revenge upon society. Understanding all this in later years never led me to accept or condone their actions in any way, but I did learn to pity them as human beings even as I feared them for what they were and what they might do. For the moment, however, in this prison car, all I knew was the fear; all I could see now was the worst side of these men, and I sat thinking apprehensively of my future among them.