ten - ‘Serious therapy’ for serious female offenders: the democratic therapeutic community at HMP Send

Summary

‘I’ve never been anywhere before here that made me feel better about myself, or made me think that I could be a better person. That's a bit sad, isn't it?’ (Sarah)

As Baroness Corston (Corston, 2007) was keenly aware, most women in prison are serving short sentences for non-violent offences. This remains the case: of all women offenders sent to prison in 2013, a total of 77% were given a determinate sentence of less than 12 months; while, as of June 2014, only 12% of women prisoners were serving an indeterminate term (Ministry of Justice, 2014a). Forty per cent of women received into prison in 2013 were sent there for the offences of theft and handling stolen goods, compared to 14% imprisoned for violence against the person (Ministry of Justice, 2014b). The long-serving female prisoner, whose serious offending represents a risk to the general public, is therefore a rarity.

For this statistically unusual and qualitatively different population, an unusual and different form of rehabilitative intervention exists: the democratic therapeutic community (TC). It is unusual because only four men's prisons, and one women's prison, in England and Wales offer one or more TCs; collectively accommodating less than 1% of the total prison population. It is different because, in contrast to the cognitive-behavioural model of change that informs most programmes approved for use in custodial and community settings, the TC's accredited treatment modality rests upon a combination of psychodynamic psychotherapy and self-consciously pro-social communal living. The TC is also as equally concerned with ‘hidden’ causes and holistic cures as the minimisation and management of reoffending.

The focus of this chapter, then, is the rehabilitative work undertaken at the TC located within HMP Send, a closed women's prison in Surrey, south-east England. Illustrated by verbatim excerpts from semi-structured interviews with staff and ‘residents’ – as prisoners are called in TCs – that the author conducted at Send as part of a wider ethnographic and phenomenological study of three prison-based TCs (Stevens, 2013), this chapter highlights the gendered nature of serious female offenders’ therapeutic needs. It further argues that immersion in “serious therapy” (Natalie) contributes to the kind of agentic renegotiation of one's image of self and redirection of one's life trajectory that has been observed in ex-offenders by scholars of desistance. First, however, there follows a necessarily brief explanation of what a TC is and does.