Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities

<p>Offender rehabilitation has become increasingly and almost exclusively associated with structured cognitive-behavioural programmes. For fifty years however a small number of English prisons have promoted an alternative method of rehabilitation: the democratic therapeutic community (TC). These prisons offer long-term prisoners convicted of serious offences the opportunity to undertake group psychotherapy within an overtly supportive and esteem-enhancing living environment. </p><p>Drawing upon original research conducted with ‘residents’ (prisoners) and staff at three TC prisons <i>Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities</i> provides a uniquely evocative and engaging portrayal of the TC regime. Individual chapters focus on residents’ adaptation to ‘the TC way’ of rehabilitation and imprisonment; the development of caring relationships between community members; residents’ contributions towards the safe and efficient running of their community; and the greater assimilation of sexual offenders within TCs for men made possible in part by a lessening in ‘hypermasculinity’. </p><p>By analyzing residents’ own accounts of ‘desistance in process’ in the TC this book argues that TCs help offenders to change by enabling positive developments to their personal identity and self-narratives: to the ways in which they see themselves and their life. The radically ‘different’ penal environment allows its residents to become someone ‘different’. </p>