Thoughts on doing therapy with prisoners

Why would, why should someone be a prison therapist? Why might violent offenders be appealing from a psychological perspective? Many (possibly most) people in the general therapy population entertain violent and destructive thoughts occasionally. Is there some valid reason to specialize in one cohort that occasionally acts out these thoughts or impulses? For that matter, is there some valid across-the-board differen­tiation between those who think and those who do?

I looked up James Gilligan, M.D., his book Violence and an interview. Prison psychiatrist for twenty-five years “as if to the manner born,” Gilligan said that he was inspired by his abusive childhood to want to understand and prevent violence. These aims wouldn’t require, though, decades of immersion in a maximum-security prison population.

I asked myself these questions when there was the possibility that I’d be getting into this work. Picturing the violent men who got caught, I found these thoughts:

* If an ex-convict were free in the general population but for the parole requirement to attend counseling, I’d look to see if there was one of the personality disorders that feature solipsism and lack of empathy. I have seen these men and have tried to work with them, but after a “valiant effort,” there proved to be no hope. A twenty-seven-year-old rapper with a long criminal résumé was solicitous, complimentary and docile each week. A veritable winsome wight, chirping delight. Until, maybe four or five sessions in, he showed to be an act. If he were in prison, would he be the same? Or might the fate of long-term incarceration get him to see things differently, turn his heart inward?

* No: The men are trapped – yes, like animals – in an artificial world. (Gilligan notes that in the history of criminal justice, long-term incarceration of malefactors is a relatively new phenomenon.) I don’t believe that any inmate, but for the most intellectually impaired or psychotic, would ever feel this entrapment was right or deserved. Who actually feels in his precious soul that his behavior, whatever it was, deserves society’s consequence – the revenge of victims or the laws of strangers? If I’m working to dive to some depth with these men, wouldn’t that sense of injustice be a buoy yanking them to the surface? How could they do the most vulnerable wounded-child work when already feeling the helplessness of not owning their lives? (Gilligan’s interviewer commented on an unwritten prison rule that men shall not cry unless it’s over their mother’s death.)

* It’s a diamond-hard certainty that these are developmentally immature “arrested development” human beings, belying the “mastermind criminal” cliché. To use violence, whether it’s throwing the tv remote at the wall or stabbing someone, means the person has reverted to or has never surpassed an earlier primitive stage of the human growth cycle. A baby should throw a tantrum and break a toy or bang his head. A seven-year-old should insist that kicking a hole in the door is “not my fault!” An adult, with a mediating neocortex and a secure base upon which to have grown, should restrain himself, understand his agency in the situation, know his feelings and describe them in words.

Summary (more or less): Many of these men will be the unrepentant personality disorder; they will be bent, a priori, by the feeling of injustice of their situation; they will be, at their molecular ground, immature, the stunted inner child. A psychotherapist or social worker does not, I’m guessing, seek to work in the prison setting with the goal of focusing on the several scattered gems of deep heart, whom passion briefly sent on a wrong turn.

Still, just as one marries for oneself not one’s partner, so I could work in that realm for myself, for a kind of personal growth, for the enjoyment of striving for therapy magic. Maybe I would fantasize: Prison is just life in microcosm! Do we really have freedom, even with a limitless horizon and passports for the acquiring, even with no alarms sounding, even with money and a car? Maybe the men and women in cells are essentially like me and you. Or, a terrible fantasy: What if I were an inmate? I imagine that I tracked down my old junior high school bully and destroyed him. Would I want to talk to a therapist?

Yes. I think it would feel like a kind of escape.

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Addendum: After conjuring up these notions, another one occurred to me. I remembered that Gilligan painted the image of prisoners living in their own individual hell. They would “feel like robots or zombies, that . . . their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords." I remembered that a goal of mine would be to help them feel more human.