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On the advancement of therapeutic penality: therapeutic authority, personality science and the therapeutic community
Author(s) -
McBride RuariSantiago
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.12583
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , therapeutic community , imprisonment , prison , personality , moral panic , psychology , situational ethics , criminology , sociology , democracy , government (linguistics) , social psychology , political science , psychotherapist , law , cognitive psychology , linguistics , philosophy , politics
In this article I examine the advancement of therapeutic penality in the UK , a penal philosophy that reimagines prison policy, practices and environments utilising psychological knowledge. Adopting a historical approach, I show how modern therapeutic penality is linked to the emergence of personality science in the nineteenth century and the development of the democratic therapeutic community ( DTC ) model in the twentieth century. I outline how at the turn of the twenty‐first century a catalytic event generated a moral panic that led the British government to mobilise psychological knowledge and technologies in an attempt to manage dangerous people with severe personality disorder. Tracing subsequent developments, I argue psychological ways of talking, thinking and acting have obtained unparalleled salience in domains of penality and, in turn, radically transformed the conditions of imprisonment.