Opening prisons’ door: A plea for psychoeducation inside the walls
This article intends to situate and promote the potential of psychoeducative counselling for adult inmates serving sentences under the supervision of either the Canadian or the Quebec correctional systems. While psychoeducators are now working in a still growing number of organizations and contexts, they are yet almost absent from the correctional scene. The most recently available figures show that only 0.36% of those psychoeducators affiliated to their professional association (the “Ordre des psychoéducateurs et psychoéducatrices du Québec”) are working in a correctional context. The article starts with a description of some specificities of this context, the two main intervention philosophies it supports, followed by some essential historical notions that might help to better understand what is being done in terms of inmates’ counselling. The article then presents the approaches now emerging as the best practices in order to reduce recidivism, an objective that remains one of the most important criteria of success in the correctional context. Professional counselling in the correctional context presents its share of challenges, some due to the constraints of the correctional environment itself, others to the characteristics of the clientele it houses. All along the article, the authors present seven “pieces of evidence” supporting the relevance of psychoeducative counselling in prison. These “pieces of evidence” are to be understood as arguments supporting the authors’ pretention that psychoeducators and their privileged counselling approaches are to be seen as potentially highly profitable for this context and the people who inhabit, voluntarily or not, its premises.