Sociomoral development for behaviorally at-risk youth: Mac's group meeting

Abstract

In 1993, at a juvenile correctional facility in Columbus, Ohio, a group of eight residents and a staff group leader were having a mutual help meeting. The focus of the meeting was an incident reported by 15-year-old Mac, one of the group members. Mac had resisted and yelled profanities at a staff member who, in accordance with institutional policy, had begun to inspect his carrying bag. The group and Mac agreed that Mac's defiance and profanity represented, in the language of the program, an Authority Problem, but the group wanted to know the meaning of that problem, its underlying "thinking error" or cognitive distortion. Angry as he thought about the incident and his subsequent disciplinary write-up, Mac explained that the bag contained something very special and irreplaceable - photos of his grandmother - And that he was not going to let anyone take the photos from him. Mac's peers understood his point of view but saw it as one-sided: Mac thought only of safeguarding his photos. He did not for a moment consider the staff member's perspective or the facility's rules: she was only carrying out institutional policy concerning inspection for possible contraband. Nor did Mac consider that she was not abusive and that he thus had no reason to assume that the photos would be confiscated. In the language of the program, Mac had Self-Centered and Assuming the Worst thinking errors; this distorted thinking had generated the surface behavior identified as an "authority problem". Furthermore, Mac's anger at staff for his write-up was identified as an Easily Angered problem and was attributed to a Blaming Others thinking error. After all, Mac had no one but himself to blame for the incident report.