Grendon’s historical and cultural context.
Grendon prison outside Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire houses 240 residents in category B secure conditions. It was opened in 1962 as an "experimental prison," after a long debate about how to provide some form of treatment for people who today might be classified as having antisocial personality disorders, or psychopathy, but after a debate which was otherwise very contemporary. Originally structured more like a psychiatric hospital, with a Physician Superintendent, in the eighties, this structure was reviewed, and overall managerial control was passed to a Governor, with protection of the clinical work overseen by an independent advisory group.
In part, the longevity of the Grendon "experiment" might be attributed to the fact that Grendon has not occupied a counter-cultural position within the Prison Service, but is very much a prison run by a prison Governor, albeit one run as a series of therapeutic communities, and one in which therapy is the core business.
Staff and residents.
The prison is divided into six wings, five of which are relatively independent therapeutic communities with 40 or so residents in each, plus a smaller assessment and preparation wing for 25. A community staff team consists of ten officers and two senior officers working a shift system and three civilian staff. The civilian staff are a therapist (a doctor or non medical psychotherapist); a psychologist and a probation officer.
Residents are from the "heavy end" of the U.K prison population, and mostly have been convicted of crimes against the person. All will have a sentence of more than four years; all have volunteered to come to Grendon, and many will have given up the option of parole to try to "sort themselves out" before being released.
Grendon Therapy
A therapeutic community process has evolved similar to that in the Henderson Hospital, i.e. with a focus on group work. Inmates have a group each morning; three mornings it is a small group and two mornings a large community group meeting. In their Book on Grendon, Genders and Player (1995-see below) characterise the therapy as "social analysis", which combines a mixture of frank behavioral and conditioning elements of therapy with social skills and modelling, cognitive and more psychodynamic elements.
The small groups are slow open with eight members, and a therapist drawn from the staff team. As we aim for residents to stay at least eighteen months, the membership of these small groups is quite stable, and conducive to genuine disclosure and psychodynamic working through. The work in the small groups is amplified by the therapeutic community environment, providing the client with forty therapists (fellow inmates) who carry on the psychotherapy in-between the formal groups; fellow inmates who are able to challenge and ferret out evasions and dissemblings by the client with a tenacity and vigor that far surpasses what the therapists can muster. As the inmates say, "you can’t con a con."
The large group community meetings serve the function of being the democratic core of the programme, where decisions about residents requests (for jobs; for changes to regime and routine) are debated and voted upon. In addition, these large groups are fertile ground for the emergence of more psychotic functioning, where staff are themselves brought to book for perceived failings and injustices. These community meetings are lively, boisterous and at times quite frightening places to be.
Treatment and Custody
Grendon’s twin roles, as a prison and as a therapeutic facility for severely personality disordered offenders embodies a dialectic that runs through the work of the organisation. The early experimental therapeutic communities for shell shocked soldiers in Northfield in the 1930s were closed down because of the worry of the senior staff at the security risk of dismantling the standard army drill. In the same way, establishing a therapeutic community in a prison requires that there is some dismantling of the usual social and physical structures that keep prisons safe. Prison officers are expected to get to know prisoners, and residents are unlocked for most of the day. Externally imposed security is replaced, however, by an internally imposed security; security imposed by each community, by each group, and by each individual. Grendon men maintain "Good order and discipline" not because they have to, but because they want to.
Nevertheless, Grendon’s therapeutic work is entirely dependant on the setting being secure, and therapeutic need to allow residents freedom to develop their own responsibility abuts against the need to maintain security as a creative tension throughout the work. The fact that security can be maintained in such a humane environment makes Grendon a model of prison craft good practice, and the empirically demonstrated efficacy of the treatment confirms Grendon’s lead in the treatment of severe personality disordered offenders.
Further Reading
Cullen, E. (1994) Grendon: the therapeutic prison that works. Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Vol 15, No. 4, 301-310.
Cullen, E., Jones, L., Woodward, R. (1997) Therapeutic Communities for Offenders: Wiley.
Genders, E. and Player, E. (1995) Grendon: A Study of a Therapeutic Prison. Clarendon Press.
Gunn, J. and Robertson, G. (1987) A ten-year follow-up of men discharged from Grendon prison. British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 151, 674-678.
Lewis, P. Context for Change (Whilst Consigned and Confined): a Challenge for Systematic Thinking. In Cullen et. al (op. cit.)
Newton, M. (1971) Reconviction after Treatment at Grendon. CP Report, Series B, No. 1. London: Office of Chief Psychologist, Prison Department, Home Office