ABSTRACT
This chapter will highlight that creating enabling environments requires (a) having a model of what impact environments can have on people in who have lost their liberty – positive and negative – and (b) examination of strategies for how we can go about offsetting these. A natural history of responses to confinement in people with different kinds of adverse developmental experiences will be outlined and the importance of assessing the situational impact of prisons and hospitals will be emphasised. Toxic reactions to confinement in people with trauma-related problems linked with traumatic misuse of power in their personal histories will be highlighted. Trauma-aware environments, where staff are trained up in specific manifestations of different kinds of adverse experience, both on Offence Paralleling Behaviour and on distress signatures played out in the treatment setting, will be described and evaluated. The notion of a treatment setting aimed at nurturing a prefiguring ‘good life’ using a recovery model, in confinement, will be developed as a framework for identifying aims for rehabilitative (and habilitative) hospital and prison regimes.
