Blog Archives

Debbie Kilroy: women and prison

Debbie shared stories of her own life, as someone who was jailed both as a young person and later as an adult. She compellingly described her own early life as one of cascading vulnerability: being locked up as a teen, abused, surrounded by low negative stereotypical expectations, socialized into prisoner role … all the while […]

Equal Justice Initiative

We recently received an annual report from the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that primarily works with poor defendants/prisoners who have not received fair treatment in the US court and corrections systems. One of their major areas of concentration is on capital cases, i.e., death penalty cases. I want to focus in this blog post […]

commentary: ‘Doing time, with a degree to show for it’

This commentary from the Chronicle for Higher Education relates to our recent post about imprisonment. A few SRV points from the commentary: • The importance of competency enhancement in supporting devalued and vulnerable individuals/groups in valued roles: specifically, the importance of making university-level education available to prisoners • The potential benefits of helping those in […]

op ed: ‘The prison boom comes home to roost’

This Boston Globe op-ed piece about prisons and the high rate of incarceration in the US raises many SRV relevant points, such as: • the pervasive influence of non-programmatic factors, such as the employment and profit incentive behind the prison boom • the link between impoverishment and imprisonment (particularly in light of societal devaluation and […]

Role of prison guard

I ran across this reference to an article about the social roles and self-perceptions of prison guards. If anyone can access the full article and let us know about it, it could be quite interesting. Abstract Penal institutions determine their expectations of their own guards’ social role. The adequate performance of this social role, however, […]

Iwawa Island, Rwanda

One of my (admittedly narrow) interests in human service history has been in the location of various types of human service programs, including but not limited to prisons, on islands. This NY Times article describes how the government in Rwanda has been sending beggars, homeless people and petty criminals to an island in Lake Kiwu […]

Stanford Prison Experiment

Dr. Philip Zimbardo (who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment) in a brief interview talking about how quickly the students in the experiment took on the roles of guard and prisoner. Tweet

Physical setting: prison architecture

In Social Role Valorization theory and in the PASSING manual, we talk about the power of the physical setting when it comes to communicating roles and images, setting expectations, affecting competency, and so on. This 2009 NY Times Magazine article describes a prison in Austria that is architecturally quite different from most prisons. From the […]

Youth prison

In the PASSING manual, Dr. Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas write that one of the few human service practices that does not have a culturally valued analog (CVA) is a prison (p. 31). A recent article in the NY Times (14 February 2010) describes the prison system for youth in New York. The article is a […]

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