Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities - Enabling Change the TC way (Hardcover)

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.

Drawing upon original research conducted with residents (prisoners) and staff at three TC prisons, "Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities" 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 .

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 .