ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the therapeutic communities (TC’s) rehabilitative regime is experienced by 'residents', as prisoners in TCs are called, before considering some of the difficulties that arise from situating therapeutic communities within correctional settings. A seemingly incongruous alliance, the prison-based TC conjoins the antithetical interests and instincts of the therapeutic and the penal to pursue a treatment and custodial model which radically challenges hegemonic conceptions of correctional rehabilitation and imprisonment. The chapter discusses that focuses upon key therapeutic factors which contribute to a psychodynamic model of change generally and the fundamental principles and ideal-typical characteristics of TCs specifically. Equally, though, the TC repudiates reductionist representations of 'the prison' as a monolithic dispenser of psychological pains and harms, whose atavistic culture inevitably reduces and harms those who live within its walls. More positively, the history and evolution of Grendon attests to the prison-based TC's remarkable resilience in rising above and learning from intermittent, intrinsically arising and externally created crises.
