Darragh O’Neill

Back in the Outside World: Case Studies of Former Residents on Release

We followed up ex-residents after release from prison and who were in the care of the Probation Service to gain their reflections on their Dovegate experiences. Participants in this part of the study were approached and agreed to be interviewed by Emily Cahalane.1 What follows is a summary of her findings and commentary and includes extracts from six of the interviews she conducted. Pseudonyms are used and some details redacted to preserve the anonymity of the participants.

Practice Issues and Research Overview

This chapter will offer some final reflections and try to answer the questions raised in the introductory chapter, namely the role played by private prisons, the very existence of TCs within prisons and the means to discover “what works” in a TC prison intervention. In doing we try and identify some of the aspirations discussed by Roland Woodward in his foreword enabling the unlocking of patterns of criminal behaviours through the therapuetic processes that give people their opportunity to change

Experiential Perspectives from within the TC: The Focus Groups

This chapter describes how we acquired and made sense of residents’ perspectives and experiences of psychological and behavioural change during their time in the TC. We will start by outlining our rationale for using a focus group methodology and then describe how we went about setting up, conducting and analysing the discussion groups. We will then give a detailed description of our findings and reflect on how they compare with previous studies that have used experiential perspectives of prison TC residents.

Getting It: A Quantification of Long-Term Outcomes

The above extract is an account from Michael Simkins of his experience as a RADA student trying to learn expressive movement by conveying the sensation of beads of mercury travelling up and down various limbs. Success in doing so seemed to elude him until, almost unconsciously, and through his own perseverance and the guidance of his tutor, he eventually got it and it was an awakening experience. This is a nice example of both succeeding in something that is difficult and elusive, which then opens up other possibilities, and the combination of one’s own motivation supported by tutored assistance. There is something of this intangible quality and combination of effort that resonates with the TC residents’ experiences. It also accords with Roland Woodward’s experience in trying to explain the possibilities and potential of the TC and what it can achieve to the prison organisation that houses it. He writes: I have lost count of how often I have inwardly thought “oh no, I’ve got to explain this all over again. Don’t they ever learn”? It is at this point that I recall the counsel of one of the first group therapist I worked with in a TC. Whilst complaining in frustration about the fact that people took so long to “get it” he calmly said “Its good practice for raising children. You just have to keep saying the same thing until they understand it. (Woodward, 2007)

Changes over Time: The Psychometric Data

Psychometric assessment tools have a long history of application in the evaluation of psychological interventions, their utility being their ability to produce quantitative and generalisable measures of therapeutic change. However, the majority of research that has been conducted into the efficacy of the democratic form of the TC model has been marked by a reliance on descriptive methodologies (Rawlings, 1998; Haigh, 2002). Furthermore, the results of such work have been critiqued for their inconsistency (Manning & Morant, 2004). This has left the treatment open to claims that the success of particular TCs comes down to issues of charisma and idiosyncratic leadership styles (Manning, 1991). Recent years have, however, seen a growth in the implementation of more structured, quantitative research designs, and this has subsequently offered a more systematic insight into the workings and impact of the TC approach (Lees, Manning & Rawlings, 2004).

After the TC: Post-Residency Questionnaire, Interviews and Psychometrics

Our second major set of research questions focused on life back in mainstream prison after having been in Dovegate TC. For this part of the research, we were interested in what the process of change looked and felt like for the men themselves. We wanted to inquire into the experiences of TC residents who had either dropped out or been required to leave as well as those who had completed at least 18 months of therapy. Interestingly, a Grendon study examined the TC residents’ perspective looking at premature leavers, but did so relatively soon after the decision was made to leave and by means of exit interviews (Sullivan, 2011). We decided to give former Dovegate residents some time for reflection before asking them about their time in the TC because, as well as obtaining their assessment of the positives and negatives of their therapeutic exposure, we wanted to gain some understanding of how they reintegrated into mainstream prison, which was the destination of most of our leavers.

Controversies, Beginnings and Workings of the Dovegate TC

On 21 November 1997 an invitation was issued to build a prison at Marchington, Staffordshire for an 800 Category B prison for adults with a facility for a 200-place therapeutic community (TC) (Genders, 2003). This was a legacy of the private finance initiative (PFI) of the early 1990s. The successful consortium, led by Premier Custodial Services, built and opened the prison containing the TC at HMP Dovegate in 2001 as the first purpose-built prison TC in the UK. Roland was Dovegate’s first director of therapy and had previously worked in TCs at HMP Gartree and Grendon.

Attachments: The Multiple Sorting Task Procedure

Much research attention has been given to sexual offenders, who mostly have been found to have insecure attachments (Ward et al., 1995, 1996; Lyn and Burton, 2004, 2005; Simons, Wurtele and Durham, 2008). This chapter will begin by summarising attachment theory and explain its link to criminality. Next we describe the way in which TC residents’ attachments to people were assessed through the Multiple Card Sorting Procedure. We chose this method because it allows the card sorter to provide their own categories and concepts, and we were able to engage the TC residents in this task, which was repeated several times. In this way we were able to explore psychological change with residents. Critical to the TC experience are the forming of relationships and the manner in which they are perceived and negotiated by residents. Our findings from the card sorts enabled us to track change of individuals, and the versatility of the method also allowed us to examine shifts in attachment style of the group. The chapter will present the advantages and draw attention to the limitations of this approach in working with residents to monitor change.

Aims and Overview

If I was in mainstream prison I’d be in a workshop but here basically I’m doing an NVQ in catering, so I’m working towards being a chef and this was something different to try, but I got the bug, it makes me wish I was 25 year younger, but I’m not, but at the end of the day I’ve got to congratulate them because they’ve come here, they haven’t gone “Oh my god, prisoners”, they’ve treated me as equals they’ve coached me when I’ve been struggling. They’ve given me encouragement; they are a nice set of people to work with. Primarily this book is about the residents of the Therapeutic Community (TC) in Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Dovegate. We wanted the first, and last, words to be those of a TC resident. There are several reasons for this. First, politically, it rather pins our colours to the mast by privileging the residents as the most important people in both the therapeutic enterprise and the research that we are reporting. Second, it highlights the importance of our attentiveness to what the TC residents had to say and the insights they had to offer about their own experiences of therapy. Third, embedded within the extract is a clue about the difference between mainstream prison and a therapeutic community, and it offers some tantalising hints about the TC Dovegate ethos, which will be explained in full later. It is also suggestive about the outcomes for this resident. Ultimately interventions within prisons, particularly TCs, are about changing lives. A strong theme of this book is “change” and the role that the TC played in bringing about changes, what they are, whether they are sustainable and what they mean to individual residents.