The prison as a space for development: A plea for a broader developmental perspective on the correctional system

Abstract

The penal system is facing increasing challenges. On the one hand, the clientele is changing in the direction of a multicultural melting pot accompanied by new phenomena, such as radicalization processes and organized clan structures. Furthermore, there is an increasing group of inmates who have grown old in prison and are characterized by many failed attempts at treatment, long periods of imprisonment, often psychopathological disorders and unfavorable perspectives for release. On the other hand, the federal states in Germany have increasingly mandated the institutions to focus the resources on criminogenic high-risk groups. In addition, the federal legislature imposed on them special treatment tasks for preventive detention centers and for the group of prisoners threatened by this measure. There is growing evidence that prisons are reaching their limits in coping with these challenges with their traditional means. The aim of this article is therefore to promote the expansion of the traditional means of intervention primarily intended for educational and therapeutic purposes, with which the resocialization mandate to the penal system has been implemented so far. Another aim is to expand them in the direction of a more fundamental consideration of the prerequisites and processes for changes in correctional institutions. The authors are convinced that developmental psychology offers promising prerequisites and appropriate methodological and theoretical tools. In the article the prison system is first analyzed historically and its mandate to resocialize the clientele is interpreted as a mandate for developmental intervention. This provides the basis for the argumentation to take a developmentally psychologically sound perspective on the processes of change of prisoners in prison. This does not entail a particular developmental psychology of the prison system itself but rather of a developmentally psychologically informed consideration and thus of a developmental psychology within the prison system. In the second part an attempt is made to design the framework for a possible developmental psychological analysis of the prison system and its clientele. It is assumed that change, i.e. development, takes place along the individual’s responses to and coping with problems that a person faces in the course of the biography. For this reason, typical tasks with which a person is confronted in the course of life are first considered, albeit with a view to special features of a target group of criminal offenders. Furthermore, extraordinary “critical” life events are examined, which cause the requirement for change due to their altering of basic conditions for the individual’s development. It is argued that the special clientele in the special context of a prison holds increased risks of such critical life events. Finally, problems are analyzed from an actional perspective on human development in general and the perspective of self-selected life goals in particular. When the processes which regulate peoples’ responses to their developmental tasks and challenges are examined, it can be seen that the necessary regulation processes within a prison population can be expected to have special characteristics that are worth investigating from a developmental psychological perspective. Finally, the penal system as a space in which processes of change are to take place is analyzed from a developmental psychological perspective. It is argued that broadening the perspective on prisons in practice and research towards a developmental psychological angle has the potential to contribute to a broadening of the possibilities of promising interventions within prison.