Innovations in prisoner rehabilitation: A three-year program.

摘要

The project presents a proposal for a three-year rehabilitation program. The first section contains a brief history of prisons as it pertains to this issue. Several relatively successful prisoner rehabilitation programs conducted by the State of California are described. They raise many important questions which are answered in later chapters.; The focus shifts from the aforementioned to the author's criticism of rehabilitation programs to date. The author's point of reference is derived from readings, previous clinical practice, psychoanalytic/Gestalt training and the directorship, for a year, of a prisoner rehabilitation project. The project was Leading Inmates Forward Through Training, (LIFTT). The LIFTT project is then outlined. The project's overall effectiveness is questioned. Specific criticisms are made.; The American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic categories as they apply to prison populations are criticized. The work of Mahler, Hartmann, Jacobson, Spitz, and Piaget is used to redefine the inmates' pathology.; The author's specific three-year rehabilitation proposal is presented in the final chapters. The first section of this presentation includes specific requirements for inmate housing, guidelines for staff selection and a complete set of job descriptions for all positions to be filled. It is based on the author's work experience with paraprofessionals, various community-based organizations, and several drug rehabilitation programs.; The second section offers a comprehensive plan for treating this particular prison population. An attempt is made to integrate past and current psychotherapies into a total on-going treatment plan. Encounter Techniques, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy (including the adjunct therapies of music, art, and dance), Psychodrama, Modern Psychoanalysis, Bioenergetics, and classical forms of Psychoanalysis are explicitly defined. They are then applied in a particular progression, to the inmates' pathologies. Theoretical considerations are offered and discussed, with each and every step. The final ordering and organization of the various therapies into a treatment plan, is based on psychoanalytical theory and the findings of the Ego psychologists.; There is no one right way or wrong way by which to conduct a rehabilitation program. There are, however, approaches that can increase or decrease the likelihood of success. This paper attempts to present those methods which, integrated within a psychoanalytic framework, should prove most successful.