Regarded as beneficial and preferable to the clients, advice delivery has been an integral part of counseling; however, there are controversies over the suitability of giving advice in counseling services, including counseling conducted in the context of prisons. Based on conversation analysis, this article tries to explore when and how police counselors in two Chinese prisons give advice and how inmate clients respond to and seek advice in offender counseling. It is found that advice delivery, supposed to be for the inmate clients' sake, only serves a phatic function in the context of prisons in which security is a priority, and transforming inmates into law-abiding citizen is the overall goal of prison rehabilitation and correction. Hence, offender counselors, intending to alleviate depression and anxiety in inmate clients, are caught in a dilemma.

No abstract

No abstract

Prison counseling as a new intervening tool to reform inmates in China has provided a site in which inmates could have more rights to confidentiality or equality and be motivated towards positive change. In actual practice, however, there are occasions in which the police counselors do not seem to act as facilitators and helpers as they are supposed to. This paper, drawing on discursive psychology, looks into how the police counselors attribute responsibility for the problems that drive the inmate clients to the counseling by focusing on variant cases. Analysis reveals that two main discursive devices, tag questions and reformulation, are employed by the police counselors in an attempt to deflect responsibility for the problems of the inmate clients and the solution to these problems from the prison and stakeholders within the prison. Prison counseling is caught in a dilemma of empowerment.

Prison counseling aims to aid inmate clients in understanding and solving problems by themselves, while problems that could be talked about or will be talked about during counseling are built on earlier sequences that occur in the opening of prison counseling. By focusing on 9 counseling sessions conducted in 2 different prisons in southern China and using discursive psychology as the methodological tool, this study explores how the police counselors open the counseling in order to prepare the inmate clients for the following troubles talk. The primary concern is how the police counselors construct prison counseling while attending to accountability issues.