POM is a new psychological theory derived from the work of Banks (1983, 1989); Mills (1990a,b, 1993); Mills and Pransky (1993); Suarez (1985); Suarez and Mills (1982); and Suarez, Mills, and Stewart (1987). Since these writings, the distinctions of POM have been clarified and simplified into three major principles: mind, consciousness, and thought (Mills and Pransky, 1993). According to POM, mind is the source of an offender's thinking, i.e., how he interprets life; his emotions, i.e., how he feels about life; his perceptions, i.e., how things look to him; and his ability to experience his world through his senses. Also according to POM, consciousness is the offender's ability to be aware of external reality. Consciousness brings an offender's thoughts to life through his senses. Through consciousness, his thoughts are converted into his experience. The power of consciousness would not exist without thought, or the offender's ability to think, sourced by the mind. POM proposes two different and observable modes of thinking by which thoughts are generated and used by all offenders. These two thought processes are called original or unconditioned thought and reactive or conditioned thought. Original thought represents the way an offender's mind was intended to work. In the conditioned or reactive thinking process, an offender will tend to process and store information in a more personal or idiosyncratic manner. In this mode, his learning is based more on interpretation than on insight and objectivity. The degree of reactive or conditioned thinking engaged in by an offender correlates directly with his experience of insecure feelings. An offender's insecurity is not a function of his life events or circumstances; it is inside the mind of an offender and occurs as a function of the phenomenon of moods. The combination of moods, insecure feelings, and conditioned thinking creates a vicious cycle that explains virtually all forms of delinquent and criminal behavior. In lower moods, an offender will feel less secure and move into the conditioned thinking mode, which activates automatic thoughts and conditioned beliefs. In this mind state, the offender will experience a self-generated negative reality with little or no awareness of what has happened or how to stop it. It is in this condition that the likelihood of some form of delinquent, criminal, or self-destructive behavior increases markedly. In critiquing social-bond and social-control theories of delinquency, this paper notes that genuine choice or responsibility can occur for offenders only when they begin to understand how the mind functions to combine thought with consciousness to create dynamic personal realities that are only "apparencies" and not "the truth." 31 references