Forensic Psychology For Dummies (121 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Isolating a prisoner
Today, solitary confinement in prison occurs for one of two main reasons: the prisoner’s own protection (for example, for abusers of young children who are likely to be picked on and attacked by other prisoners) or for punishment and control (for example, if a person breaks important prison rules, violently attacks another prisoner or smashes up his cell in anger).
Solitary confinement can be extremely debilitating for some people, especially if the prisoner has no contact at all with others, but in some progressive prisons it’s used as an opportunity to help a prisoner to calm down and then to open up to one-to-one counselling in a controlled environment. Most jurisdictions have legal limits on how long a person can be kept in solitary confinement as a punishment.
Spending 23 hours a day in a cell with nothing to do can be soul-destroying for anyone. For a person who has difficulty in reading and never had his awareness of possibilities broadened through effective education, it can be extremely destructive.
All these aspects cause difficulties when working on psychological issues with prisoners. The central challenge is expressed clearly by a very experienced prison psychologist, Kevin Rogers, who told me:
Prison culture looks down on any sign of weakness and susceptibility, and discourages the expression of sincere emotions or familiarity. Some prisoners embrace this in a way which encourages a keen investment in one’s reputation for toughness, and promotes an attitude towards others in which even apparently irrelevant verbal abuse, disrespect, or physical infringements must be responded to speedily and intuitively, often with decisive force. In some cases, the failure to take advantage of weakness is often seen as a symbol of weakness itself and viewed as provocation for manipulation. In male prisons, it may encourage a type of hypermasculinity in which power and control are overestimated as critical parts of one’s identity.
These consequences of imprisonment make exploring any psychological problems an inmate may have extremely difficult, especially any aspects of themselves that may indicate weakness or require them to acknowledge and explore their emotional reactions. Offenders can be particularly reluctant to seek any help with their difficulties or even recognise that they have any problems in dealing with other people that need addressing.
A further aspect that makes psychological help so difficult within a total institution is that a high percentage of prisoners have experienced some form of childhood abuse, which featured similar qualities of coercive strictness and psychological and possibly physical insult. The callous nature of prison existence may seem to some prisoners as just ‘business as usual’ – that’s what their world is like, inside or outside prison. Imprisonment just reminds them of what made them feel so unworthy initially, which may have been part of the reason for the criminality that brought them to prison in the first place.
Specialising in working in prisons
Psychologists who spend their careers working in prisons, sometimes call themselves
correctional psychologists,
and have their own associations such as the American Association for Correctional Psychologists (AACP), which has hundreds of members.The bulk of British psychologists working in prisons and secure units would look to the Division of Forensic Psychology of the British Psychological Society, but they’re regulated, like all professional psychologists by the Health Professions Council. But they refer to themselves as
prison psychologists
or even just
applied psychologists.Some psychologists provide guidance to the institution rather than individual prisoners, to help prisons work as organisations that contribute to reforming their inmates. This work can include helping to select or train staff or to set in motion various programmes of work with offenders. Sometimes such work is very challenging because the institutions have an ingrained set of attitudes and a culture that’s fundamentally punitive and not informed by any understanding of the causes and processes that underpin criminality.
In certain crisis situations, such as a prisoner taking someone hostage, psychologists may help to negotiate and deal with the situation as I discuss in Chapter 8.
Investigating Some Approaches to Treatment
Although all offenders are subject to the pressures of institutionalisation that I describe in the preceding section, and respond in different psychological ways and to varying degrees, some prisoners are much more vulnerable to these pressures and the overall pains of imprisonment than others. These inmates include the mentally ill and those who aren’t very bright, often being learning disabled and having been passed over in their schooling, as well as those held in solitary confinement because of their inability to cope with prison (flip to the earlier sidebar ‘Isolating a prisoner’ for more on this issue).
Psychologists often treat these specific difficulties on an individual basis, usually in a one-to-one format using cognitive behavioural therapy (see the later ‘Getting it together: Group or one-to-one programmes’ and ‘Using cognitive behavioural methods’ sections respectively) over an agreed time span and number of sessions. Ideally, prison staff monitor changes in mood or behaviour that the vulnerable inmate suffers, and reports them to psychologists on a regular timescale with interventions amended accordingly.
In this section, I focus on the opportunity that incarceration provides for psychologists to work directly with inmates, providing various programmes that may be thought of as forms of ‘treatment’.
Except in a small subset of offenders, I’m not implying that people commit crimes because they’re ‘ill’. I use the word
treatment
to describe many different forms of intervention with convicted criminals.
Working with offenders
Psychologists work with convicted offenders in relation to the following broad tasks that connect to three different stages of the offender’s life:
Past:
Helping offenders to deal with problems that may have been a direct cause of the actions that produced the offence, such as inability to manage their own aggression, drug and/or alcohol addiction or longer-term problems, such as mental illness or personality disorder.