I started working groups in response to a request from the Directorate of the District Prison of my city. I worked for some years in prison, dealing with prisoners of Guidance Services and the Reggio Emilia area, a few months ago, I started working as a psychologist for the local health, dealing with the reception of new prisoners arrived and individual pathways and the accompanying support for the detention. The request made to me
planned to roll out a project intervention group, consisting of at least fortnightly meetings with a dozen people prisoners, detained by the department of 'protected-differentiated'. I was fasting
of group psychology, I could not basarmi on a wide professional experience, if I had taken some teaching in middle school and university top-and was not attributable to a clinical intervention, but only training. So I was wondering what I did with such a group as you could work with such people.
With the desire to do my best, I started collecting and reading material about different interventions with groups, I also searched the documentation on Intervention with this specific type of prisoners, which they consider essential to know in order to create a project to measure. I was sure that if I created a thorough knowledge of criminological studies made on this particular population of offender, I could organize meetings tailored to them, we could predict the contents, implications and characteristics of the process.
So I picked up quite a store of knowledge: the term means different-protected those detainees who can not live in the common areas, because they have taken unethical behavior of the majority of the prison population (committed crimes of a sexual nature, especially pedophilia, or collaborate with the justice system). They are then assembled in sections and, to remain "different" from others, have no contact with the rest of the prison population, they live, eat and go to air only ever between them.
I felt stimulated by the challenge, but at the same time a bit 'scared and perplexed, I wondered how they would react men, imprisoned for crimes so tiring even to imagine, as they welcomed the initiative and that they would use it. Have learned about this particular population had disturbed me greatly, I was wondering how you could manage a similar group, how to contain, limit the issues that I felt especially tiring for me.
Inside me I felt that making the meetings with the protected, to make the comparison in a 'protected', could be an important action, human and potentially therapeutic, but at the same time I thought about what I had seen happen to people in prison and I was not sure that these inmates would participate.
To date the detention is seen as a simple deprivation of liberty, which refers not only to physical aspects, but is in fact impossible for the man held to continue to exist as a social actor, related to the system and environment which is a party. The individual small, while remaining father, husband, brother, is forced to abdicate the role it plays in the life and freedom, on the other hand, this dispossession of its roles is accompanied by an prison in which everything, from the time of interview, the figures with which he relates, consistently leads to a single role, that of the offender. This role and its significance is likely to expand, subtracting space to other spheres and nuances that make up the identity of the individual, as if the detention would facilitate a definition of identity in negative indicators, the progressive elimination of alternative points of view.
In my work with people always held what strikes me most is the intensity of the experience of their withdrawal discomfort. The reclusive person is in a constant state of defense and distrust, deprived of part of its rights and at the mercy of the prisoner is forced to live together consistently defends and does not trust anyone. The brutality of the reclusive life is made up of many parts that refer to millions of masks, used to make the best of a bad job, to protect themselves from threats lurking that color space and time, melancholy and dark tones of reports and generally poor surface or intense, but unidirectional.
The leitmotiv that links the different stages of detention (arrest, detention, validation, detention) is the process of depersonalization. The detainee is not only deprived of physical freedom, he is registered with a number, can not hear hardly pronounce his first name and is stripped of his personal at the time of the Institute, wedding ring, watch, earrings, necklaces, pictures ... everything is deposited in an envelope and stored in a warehouse until the new arrangement.
During detention decision-making autonomy of the individual is resized, he no longer has control of his movements, must comply with the timetable, follow the directions of police officers and prison get back to the decisions of the Magistrate, which may provide for a transfer. The rigidity of movement goes hand in hand stiffness legislation, and organizational hierarchy. The climate of autocratic power, which characterizes the life sentence, makes a regressive process of detainees and operators, which calibrating their daily lives on making requests and waiting for a response. The most primitive fears, awakened by the depersonalization and the forced cohabitation, are used to maintain control, making promises and concessions in order to maintain the autocratic power to control the inmate. The strong pressure exerted on prisoners create a climate of widespread suspicion, everyone is potentially an enemy to others and the individual power is weakened, given the almost total lack of cooperation.
Every action is regulated by a regulation depends on a permit, almost nothing depends on the individual. You experience a gradual deterioration of situations where he can experience in decision making and the consequent responsibility. The choices, needs and wishes of the prisoner depend on who has the power to decide, to the point that with the passage of time, the irresponsibility and dependence on other decisions become part of a lifestyle and sometimes stops the inmate request, pending the closing of the end of their sentence. For many detainees waiting inexorably fills every hole, every fragment of time and thought, this condition often do whatever it loses its meaning, and renounce all forms of subjective activity, developing apathy and anhedonia.
During detention the detainee is never alone, never far from the gaze of others and not living together is chosen, but it sets. For this, although people are generally in groups, the perceived distance between them is immense; exists an unwritten rule of avoidance of speeches and questions about personal life, about suffering, suffering. The topics addressed are those of criminal behavior, crime, past future ... sometimes, we talk about processes, hearings, appeals, lawyers, law ... can almost hear the noise uniform background that cancels, hides and protects the rest. In prison there are those who choose to escape the noise of chatter and other soothing to use, what drugs, psychiatric drugs, which play an important role preventive and trattamentale, but often are hired only to obtain a sedative and alienating. There are some people who manage to resist the push to inactivity, cultivating personal passions and hobbies like reading, drawing and developing unexpected forms of creativity, how to build from scratch an oven with aluminum foil to cook the pizza or sculptures by assembling small discarded objects.
At the interpersonal level, the alienation of prisoners takes different forms. It leads to distort any report from that meeting with family members, who held the smiling face, which tells of feeling good and often tries to bring a smile to his children and his wife, the one with the businesses to which the limited attempt to show, in most cases, its best side, often in search of that relation 'equal', which in prison is not obvious, as precluded by roles and personal characteristics.
In light of the above is not hard to believe that the prison population is particularly vulnerable to depression, which can lead to acts of violence, where there are no spaces to lead and develop their own emotional experiences. This occurs most frequently in people with few tools, unaccustomed to physical inactivity and management of emotions and thoughts. During detention, the cognitive activity often becomes the dominant one, ideas are often repetitive, persistent, intrusive, obsessive and very tiring. For those detained more fragile and less used to this 'cognitive dominance', is frequently shake the implementation of self-and hetero-damaging, such as self harm, suicide attempts and suicide, hunger strikes, verbal and physical attacks, which refer to processing difficult or near-existent in the course of the experience of imprisonment and emotional experience that accompanies it. The condition of emotional isolation in which detainees are ends up weakening their personal resources. Many of them often end up leaving with their feelings, their emotions and with oneself, gradual and slow structure is the loss of awareness of their value.
This condition, called 'hibernation prison', describes a path sentences, after which it is believed that these individuals are 'returned' to the company even with all its features 'antisocial', just as if they were thawed and at the same time were barren of humanity and with an extra strong dose of bitterness, even leading to their treatment in prison. In this regard, I remember the story of a young Albanian prisoners, who after his first experience of imprisonment, he was 'imprisoned' in his room voluntarily for two months because of the anger that you felt that inevitably cast against him and anyone who came near. Dispose of this experience, just an animal wounded, had taken a long time and self-control, and caused a deep personal suffering. I wonder how many are able to recognize the risk of anger and aggression absorbed during an experience like that sentence and those who fail to self-restrain and to find ways to process it or at least manage it.
article 1, paragraph 2, of Presidential Decree of 30 June 2000, n.230, or the Regulations for Prison Administration and the measures deprive or limit freedom, states: "The rehabilitative treatment of sentenced and inward and also to promote a process of modification of the conditions and personal attitudes, as well as family and social relations that are obstacles to a constructive social participation. "
the light of my training on the Person Centered Approach, sent me the recipe for this is all too evident. The report enables the recovery of facilitating contact with their authentic self, with its own feel, thanks to a climate of unconditional positive regard and empathy that promotes self-disclosure. The ego grows in contact with you, to which it is stretched from birth and through this exchange, the individual learns to recognize the self, thereby arriving at a natural separation.
The report can thus function as an internship or a gym, in which the individual regains contact with their actual experience, their own emotional experiences and their perception. It is this contact, this self-understanding according to Rogers that triggers the change, even according to the assumption that, when one becomes aware of her own life and accept this feeling, it has already changed. Contacting their feelings and emotions through the feedback of others, the individual may face deeper and deeper with them, live them without fear them, accept them as their own and can come to rationally assess the issue in question and answer it.
According to the prison system, treatment of prisoners entails the creation of spaces, activities and services specific acts to stimulate change, understood as personal growth. As part of this work is the work place, schools, training courses, sports activities and interviews with the staff to the treatment.
From this point of view I would say that in addition to specific activities planned, the law itself recognizes the importance of the relationship as a tool for change em'interrogo on large numbers of recent years, the overcrowding and budget staff time to treatment and, as has already happened in the history of psychological treatment, it is at this point that makes me think of the savings in time, effort and personnel that you would enjoy, if you could arrange group interventions within systematic the prisons.
Within a world where the dominant emotions are anger, shame, loneliness, sadness, despair, and where abuse of affective and emotional detachment, division by what hurts, rationalization, projection, and fantastically acted, I can not help but grasp the potential effectiveness of an intervention group. Once
Rogers wrote that the 'luck' work with groups over the years it was attributed, among other things, the hunger for relationships [...] in which feelings and emotions can be expressed spontaneously, without first being censored or suppressed. " Faced with the reality of prison life, for as I know I can not but notice the enormity of this prison world hunger, to the point that many people, offenders and professionals, developing many forms and often deleterious to move away from this need frustrated and dissatisfied.
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