A few weeks ago, we wrote about the opening of a mental health court in Philadelphia to help deal with a problem that’s overwhelming the U.S. justice system — poor mental …
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There’s much pathology in what is termed “normal” society, and the people who care little about those in prison most probably care little about themselves, think they themselves deserve little, so why should anyone else deserve anything good?
I’ve worked as a therapist in two adult prisons, and in several treatment settings with adolescents who had gotten entangled in the justice system (some classified as juveniles, some tried and sentenced as adults.) My experience has been that although both adult inmates and adolescent offenders often have serious mental and emotional health problems without which they’d probably never have gotten in trouble, way too many people who should know better – legislators and corrections professionals, as well as the general public – find it easier to ignore that fact and have a harshly punitive attitude toward these folks, as well as a distorted dualistic “us/them” way of seeing them. It’s both morally wrong and ineffective in terms of protecting society and making people less likely to re-offend after they’re released. Working in prison was a mixed experience – it was rewarding in terms of helping people with serious problems, of being free from the rigmarole of managed care, and of being able to do long-term and intensive work with clients instead of six-session drive-by counseling, but it was deeply frustrating because the system was pathological, and because often the rest of the institution was undoing our work as fast as we could do it, both because of the abusive issues of many staff (though there were also security staff who cared deeply and did their best to help inmates) and because, for the sake of making inmates easier to manage, the system was designed to stamp out the very qualities of internal locus of control, self-efficacy, and healthier boundaries we were trying to help them achieve.