Forensic Psychology

On May 20, 2012, a gang fight inside a privately run Mississippi prison exploded into a multi-hour riot that left the facility in chaos. Twenty-four-year-old Senior Correctional Officer Catlin Carithers, called in on his day off, was cornered and beaten to death on the roof after inmates used food carts as a makeshift ladder to reach him. This episode walks through how the riot escalated, what happened to Carithers, and how prosecutors later held accountable the men who took part in the attack and destroyed evidence in its wake.

In part two of their look at vigilantism, Carlos and retired FBI profiler Andrew Bringuel dig into what actually motivates someone to bypass the justice system and act on their own. Using the PEPS model — personal, economic, power/political, and social motives — they break down real cases, including the Bernhard Goetz shooting, to separate the myth of the vigilante from the psychology behind it. The conversation also turns practical, weighing what "good" versus destructive vigilante behavior looks like when communities feel the system has failed them.

The legend goes that gangster "Machine Gun" Kelly coined the term "G-Men" when he begged federal agents not to shoot during his 1933 arrest — but the real story is a lesson in institutional myth-making. This episode traces how J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau and a cooperative press turned a routine capture into a branding coup months after the fact. It's a case study in how authority, narrative control, and media complicity combine to shape public memory long before anyone had a Twitter account.

A billionaire’s son gets caught in a trailer park sting. The league says it is reviewing the matter. This is what happens when the story a man tells himself finally meets the version everyone else can see.

Every case has a moment before the moment. A man sits in an SUV at a mobile home park in East Palestine, Ohio, waiting for something he told himself was one thing while some other part of him knew it was another. That is where this story starts, not with the arrest, but with the choice that made the arrest inevitable.