ABSTRACT

How can environments play a role in assisting and sustaining personal change in individuals incarcerated within the criminal justice system? Can a failure to address contextual issues reduce or undermine the effectiveness of clinical intervention? Bringing together a range of leading forensic psychologists, this book explores and illustrates inter-relationships between interventions and the environment in which they take place.

This book examines how the environment can be better utilised to contribute to processes of change and how therapeutic principles and practices can be more strongly embedded through being applied in supportive, facilitative environments. In addition, it expands on emerging conceptualisations of how psychological functioning and environmental context are inextricably linked and offers an alternative to prevailing intrapsychic or ‘essentialist’ views of areas such as personality and cognition.

Providing new and challenging insights and perspectives on issues of central relevance to forensic psychology and related disciplines, this book contributes to the development of innovative and unifying directions for research, practice and theory. This book will be an essential resource for those who work with or intend to work with offenders, particularly practitioners, researchers and students in the fields of psychology, criminology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and social work.

chapter 3|29 pages

Only connect

Implications of social processes and contexts for understanding trauma

chapter 4|23 pages

Trauma-informed care and ‘good lives’ in confinement

Acknowledging and offsetting adverse impacts of chronic trauma and loss of liberty

chapter 5|17 pages

A campaign for climate change

The role of therapeutic relationships within a climate of control

chapter 7|16 pages

Rehabilitating offenders

The enabling environment of forensic therapeutic communities

chapter 9|19 pages

Psychologically informed planned environments

A new optimism for criminal justice provision?

chapter 10|15 pages

Democratisation, disability and defence mechanisms

Reality confrontation in Rampton

chapter 11|14 pages

Relationships, social context and personal change

The role of therapeutic communities

chapter 12|13 pages

Wearing two hats

Working therapeutically as a discipline prison officer

chapter 14|17 pages

Creating an enabling environment in high security prison conditions

An impossible task or the start of a revolution?

chapter 16|17 pages

The heart and soul of the transforming environment

How a values-driven ethos sustains a therapeutic community for sexual offenders

chapter 20|13 pages

Nidotherapy

A systematic environmental therapy