Stumbling on the rehabilitation gold? Foucault vs. Foucault in San Quentin and beyond

Abstract

This article examines GRIP, a rehabilitation program currently spreading through California’s state prison system. While most ‘violent offenders’ come to GRIP hoping to increase chances of parole, this yearlong program with four main components – stopping violence, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, understanding victim impact – is meant to create conditions in which inmates can ‘do the work’ leading to genuine transformation. A central claim is that due in part to the trauma-treatment model GRIP follows, inmates end up ‘stumbling on the gold’ and going through changes (involving recovery of an ‘authentic self ’ rooted in childhood) that helps enable skillful responses even to ‘moments of imminent danger’. Understandably, researchers of such programs may seek theoretical inspiration from the ‘dominant’ version of Foucault. Yet this paper sets out to change the conversation about prisons and rehabilitation in part by demonstrating the utility of the ‘other’ Foucault’s pragmatic recovery of body-based self-disciplining practices and regimes.

Relational Work in the Struggle Against Poverty: Balancing Scholarly Critiques and Emancipatory Practices in the Nonprofit Sector

“…These processes can be controversial among academics in part because positive freedom has particular normative ends (e.g., self-sufficiency and yes, greater responsibility) for individuals. Yet in places as unexpected as prison rehabilitation programs in California, positive freedom generating processes continue to take forms which seem to be aligned with those prescribed by Foucault in his final years (Paulle, 2017).…”

“…This specific form of RW can be informed by attempts to foster understandings of—and ways of coping with—economic, political, ethnicity, or gender-based domination. Some NPOs remain dedicated to this type of explicitly critical RW (Paulle, 2017), even as others have been shut down for doing this or forced to operate in ways that underscore how empty talk of strengths-based approaches dovetails with concerns about neoliberal governmentality (Lyon-Callo, 2004). What is more, even if for some skeptics RW focuses too narrowly on responsibility and stabilizing the individual in the short term, this still leaves open the question of longer term effects.…”

Prison employment and its conflict with therapeutic and counselling programmes: The experiences of Czech prison personnel

“…As I will be arguing, there is a strong tendency to employ inmates at any cost, leaving therapeutic/counselling programmes behind, which makes it difficult to impossible for prison personnel to help inmates work on their personal problems (for example, their psychological traumas, debts, and family problems). Concurrently, it has been proven that therapeutic/counselling programmes can crucially support the re-entry and resettlement process and lower the recidivism rate (Ferrer-Perez and Bosch-Fiol, 2018; Gideon et al, 2010; Haviv and Hasisi, 2019; Long et al, 2019; Paulle, 2017). In contrast, disciplinary and punitive programmes, based on work and/or boot camps, are not very effective (Bahr et al, 2012; Cullen, 2012).…”

“…Of course, adherence to just one of the concepts is not sufficient per se, since there are other conditions that must be met for rehabilitation to work. These conditions include matching the inmates' needs to their programme (Long et al, 2019); successful completion of the whole programme (Haviv and Hasisi, 2019); a positive therapeutic climate (Blagden et al, 2016); and the quality of the programmes on offer (Paulle, 2017).…”

Keeping violent offender rehabilitation on track: How the diffusion and redirecting of attentional focus/mood work in the GRIP program

“…GRIP can perhaps be best described as a groupbased trauma-treatment and life skills-teaching program that follows a somaticawareness-centered model. 6 (For a qualitative investigation of GRIP informed by "late" Foucault's pragmatic recovery of body-based self-disciplining practices and regimes, see Paulle, 2017).…”