Prison is a loaded word. It evokes fear, cringing, abhorrence, and that ultimate human reaction, the desire for escape. There is something in the human being that would escape from confinement, from bars and walls and barbed-wire fences, from chains, discipline, and constant control. Despite our aversion, there may be no other institution which so desperately needs the care and attention of humanistic psychologists than a prison.
More than five years ago, at the request of prison authorities, I developed a prison reform program. Through this program we were able to facilitate significant changes in incarcerated individuals and in the prisons in which they live. These were changes that went beyond simply working toward a crime-free life. Finding values capable of integrating the entire human being, including social, physical, economic, psychological, and spiritual aspects, is the quest of the inmates in the program. To the degree that they are able to find and incorporate such values, these inmates are successful in achieving real change.
Our methods were multi-modal, and our goals were to reach all parts of the human being, with an aim at integration. To implement milieu therapy, we created a humanistic atmosphere in our section of the prison. Regular exercise programs, opportunities for fresh-air sports and field trips, offered a release for the physical.
To bolster economic skills, we made sure that inmates took advantage of the job-training programs extant in the prison and also encouraged them to develop their own handicrafts and cottage industries.
Social-skills training helped reduce suspiciousness and facilitate healthy interaction among inmates and staff as well. Cognitive changes occurred through lectures, readings, and discussions. Psychological support was available, primarily through group therapy, and also through individual, family, and marathon therapy. Integration Therapy was used to promote and integrate the total person. Spiritual growth flourished as the blocks existing in these other channels were cleared out.
But more important than our methods and our materials was the attitude and understanding that we had about prisons and prisoners. I believe it was this attitude which was instrumental to our success. Understanding this viewpoint means understanding our program.
...the very first characteristic necessary in any prison worker is the ability to recognize their own capacity for evil. |
In its original concept, a penitentiary is a place where a person goes to be penitent—to recognize his mistakes, to make amends, to seek forgiveness, and to undergo transformation. In theory it is a place for the person who has transgressed the laws of human nature, and thus transgressed upon his or her own soul. The penitent seeks renewal and a fresh chance at being human. Ironically, prisons these days are anything but humanizing. Tales of sadism, torture, cruelty, and horrors in prisons are in the daily news and need no elaboration here. But even in the best of circumstances, the very structure of most prisons tends to dehumanize.
Raymond Corsini (1995, personal communication) commented on his years of prison work: "I have seen murders in prison, seen executions, but worse [is] the slow, silent submission of people [who change] from being independent and alive to going out beaten and broken, not by violence, not by cruelty in the usual sense, but by slow erosion of unity of self by time, by routine, by following orders. It is very sad, the whole thing."
What hope is there then for changing prisons, and for changing prisoners? The answer to this depends on one’s outlook on prisoners. I believe that in our need to "escape" from prisons, we see the person who has committed a crime as fundamentally different from ourselves. Instead of seeing a human being, we see a psychopath, or sociopath, or multiple personality, or whatever other visage is foreign enough to our own to make us feel secure.
Facing the prisoner means facing the shadow in oneself. It means seeing our own capacity, as human beings, to be evil, to think evil, and to commit evil. Recognizing this common factor helps pull away the veil from the prisoner, and from ourselves. I have found that the very first characteristic necessary in any prison worker is the ability to recognize his or her own capacity for evil.
Next, I believe it is necessary to be able to recognize that along with this capacity for evil exists a capacity for goodness, for growth, and for actualization of positive potentials. Reaching this core of goodness is the challenge that we face when dealing with convicted persons.
Speaking from an Islamic perspective, we know the human being to have a positive potential, but also to be capable of acting against this positive inner nature and committing crimes or sins against one’s own nature. The human being is also endowed with a conscience, an alarm set off by transgressions. The person who listens to the call of the conscience and reforms has grown as a human being and has gained self-knowledge. The person who ignores the conscience goes farther and farther from his own nature and makes the return ever more difficult.
Dutch prison criminologist Julie Feldebrugge summarized her experience by saying that the problem with criminals was not a lack of conscience, as criminology has formerly held. Rather, these were individuals who were troubled deeply by their transgressions, and acted out in ways that expressed this trouble and torment, causing them to go deeper and deeper into crime. (Feldebrugge, J.T.T.M., "Rehabilitation of Patients with Personality Disorders: Patient-Staff Collaboration Used as a Working Model and Tool," Criminal Behavior and Mental Health 2, pp. 169-177, 1992.)
Carl Goldberg gave further insight into the person who commits crime in his finding that evil begins with a lack of empathy and progresses into a total lack of sensitivity to the humanity, and thus the rights, of others (Goldberg, C. "Daimonic Development," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 35 (3) pp. 7-36, 1995).
Persons who commit criminal acts are individuals who lack a positive sense of self. They are often individuals who come from backgrounds in which they never tasted positive regard, never knew what it is to be loved or even minimally accepted or attended to. This has, in turn, compromised their ability to have empathy for others; not ever having been understood or cared about, they are unable to learn to understand and care about others, and thus commit crimes against them. Ironically, most prison situations are a continuation or exacerbation of the lifelong, dehumanizing experiences of the inmates.
In our treatment program, we set about to repair and mend, to find that self-crying for empathy, and to teach empathy in return. First, however, it is necessary to break through the wall of defense. In our experience, the resistance of the prisoners is largely a resistance to their own sense of guilt, a resistance to face the magnitude of their transgressions.
...many clients expressed the belief that these uncovered sins of meanness, cruelty, and violation of the rights of others were the "real" reason they were in prison. |
To deal with this, we created a therapeutic atmosphere in our section of the prison. In this atmosphere, empathy, genuineness, positive regard, and therapeutic presence were extended to staff and inmate alike. The prison environment is often heavily adversarial, with staff pitted against prisoners. Prison staff, guards, and other personnel may separate themselves from con- fronting prisoners as persons, perhaps for the reasons mentioned above of trying to deny or avoid their own negative aspects. Added to this is the burden and sometimes the guilt of being "my brother’s keeper," of sharing responsibility for the continued incarceration of another human being. Staff was relieved at the opportunity to receive empathy, and to learn to extend it to others.
Inmates also responded to the call to their humanity. Giving respect to the human being, while condemning the crime, we were able to allow inmates to separate their selves from their behavior, to respect themselves, but to hate their crime. They suffered agony, pain, and breakdown as their defenses broke down and as they faced their guilt. We supported them through this process. Battered consciences were revived and enlivened. It was interesting to note that many of the most tormenting memories uncovered were not of the crimes for which they were convicted, but of other transgressions, usually of an interpersonal nature.
Further, in therapy, many clients expressed the belief that these uncovered sins of meanness, cruelty, and violation of the rights of others were the "real" reason they were in prison.
After being in the program for months, one client decided to face the family he abandoned when he got involved with drugs and crime. I went to her house, rang the bell, and she opened the door. After 15 years, there she was. But her face was broken, so broken. (Here he bursts into tears rolling his head back and forth.) And I could see so many white hairs. I ruined her life. I ruined her life. (He cries again, and it takes time for him to control himself.) She said to me, "So it’s you, what business do you have here, what could you possibly want from me?" I could hear noises in the background, someone moving around. I told her "I came to see my daughters." She said, "You don’t have any children here. These children have no father. If they had one, he would have shown up by now." I felt so ashamed. I just didn’t expect her to answer like that. She has the right . . . but I just didn’t expect it. (Here, the client withdrew into sobs.) I just felt so worthless, like such a bum for having let her and the kids alone for all these years.
Facing such guilt is often excruciatingly painful and requires support. Simply facing guilt, however, is not enough. Hope and belief in the possibility of change is the next essential step. The staff’s support, encouragement, and genuine belief that inmates could change helped inmates be able to see themselves in a new way. The staff at this point focused on that positive inner potential, and inmates learned to sense this as well. An important factor in instilling hope was the work of the peer counselors. Through the grace of God, many of the most notorious inmates—with a reputation in the prison as well as in outside society of being tough, clever, and incorrigible—were able to make significant changes while in the program.
Resistance is largely to ... guilt... to face the magnitude of their transgressions. |
One such person had been a multiple offender. From early youth, he had been picked up for gang fights, knifing, petty theft, and then later for repeated offenses of drug use and trafficking. A huge hulk of a man, he was a model tough guy for youths who had no other hope for an identity other than to become delinquents and felons. He has under- gone great transformation in the program. Voluntarily serving as a peer counselor, his powerful presence in the prison milieu, as well as his participation in group therapy, provides a great source of hope and inspiration for others.
At this point, when individuals are hopeful of building a new self, they need a plan, a set of values on which to base this new self. Most important is to replace the old set of values. Goodness, a clear conscience, respect for humanity, and in many cases, worshiping God, take the place of opportunism, quick profits, and respect from the "gang," as targeted goals.
One of the most difficult challenges that inmates face is making the transition to life on the outside. This is one of the reasons that a halfway house is an integral part of our program. As the men in our program emerged from the prison, the expectations their families had of them rose considerably. Before imprisonment, the needs and demands of the family could be met quickly through crime; now, the individual had to face making it the hard way. A lack of legitimate, marketable skills, the dullness of a "clean" life as compared to the thrill of drugs and crime, the prejudice of society against giving ex-prisoners jobs, all combine to make this period an especially critical one. Depression, frustration, and anger often accompany this phase, and are dealt with in weekly group therapy sessions.
In a typical group session, one group member said: Yeah, I mean, a man’s value, being a man, means that when you walk in that house, and the kids and the wife look at you, you have something in your hand to show them. I mean, they don’t say anything, but when I come in empty-handed, I see the disappointed look on their faces, and they just turn off and go to their rooms. It rips me up inside. Then, my buddies meet me on the street, hug me, and slip a little "package" into my pocket, just like old times. I mean I could sell this, or at least use it and forget my troubles. I don’t know doc, you gotta help me. I just can’t stand it much longer.
Another member of the group, who had been convicted on armed robbery charges, a silent type who was rarely heard from, spoke up. "I have the same problem, in a way. We can’t afford a lot of things, like we can’t buy chicken, or even rice [a staple food in his culture]. But, to me, I mean, this doesn’t make me feel worthless. ’Cause I know that if I do something, anything, outside the law, or even something that just doesn’t sit right with me, then that would really make me feel useless. It would make me feel as if all of these years, all of this hard work in these sessions were wasted. I would really feel worthless then. I would feel that I betrayed myself and all the people who care about me. My family has gotten used to it. I know what they need, and they know I care. But they have gotten used to me like this, and they may even prefer me like this. I don’t know. But I know I just can’t go back to being any other way."
Spirituality is often released when the individual is able to break through the barriers of a blocked conscience. Individuals in the program are provided ample time for thought, introspection, meditation, and spiritual study, should they be so interested.
The road to recovery is long and difficult, requiring support from others and self-vigilance. Persons released from the prison attend on-going classes, may participate in group therapy, and have access to individual, family, and crisis counseling upon demand.
In my experience, facilitating transformations in prisons requires the courage to look in the mirror of the human and see the face of evil and the face of goodness. It requires a belief in the human ability to change; it requires support, hard work, and in our experience, the grace of God.
About the Author:
SAYID MUHAMMAD-MUSHIN JALALI-TEHRANI, Ph.D., is a graduate of Saybrook Institute. In addition to his prison project, he does consulting and clinical work, and is the developer of Integration Therapy. He founded the Islamic Association for Humanistic Psychology in Mashhad, Iran. He welcomes contact at tehrani@emamreza.net and more about his work can be seen at www.geocities.com/j_tehrani_phd
