Tucked away in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains, Allenwood Penitentiary inmates are using group therapy sessions to learn when they are angry and when they filled with rage with the help of the Bethesda Family Services Foundation. The foundation provides therapeutic services to inmates nationwide as part of a pre-release program that helps offenders prepare for their return home.

“There is a difference between anger and rage,” explains Dominic P. Herbst, Bethesda Foundation president and founder. “Rage cannot be controlled. The moment that anger is described as uncontrollable, we must change our semantics. Anger is controllable; you are allowed to be angry. But rage is completely different. Rage is capable of murder.”

Pinpointing the difference between these emotions is just one step in the long process of healing for inmates. The sessions include role playing, letter writing, and emphasizing family communication to help inmates control their emotions.

The inmate waiting list for these sessions has doubled every year since its inception 10 years age, which makes officials happy because they believe the therapy sessions are helping offenders. More than two thousand inmates have graduated since the inception of the therapeutic program

“The Bethesda program gets the most interest from our inmate population. It is successful because it meets a vital need in the offender community,” says Robert Coffey, Allenwood's supervisor of education. “The program addresses the need for primary relationships and the impact a lack of important relationships can have on human emotions.”

Healing emotional wounds

The foundation provides therapeutic services to inmates nationwide as part of a pre-release program that helps offenders prepare for their return home.

Other sessions focus on unresolved family problems. For these sessions, juveniles and adult offenders come together to role play.  The adults act as estranged parents. The juveniles play the children the adult inmates might have lost touch with during their incarceration.

According to Herbst, the parent-child role playing sessions release emotions that otherwise might have remained hidden.

“I really believe that people act out because of emotional wounds,” he says. “For my entire career, I've tried to find the source of these behaviors. When we engage in group therapy sessions, we really get to the root of these issues.”

Conversations between adult and juvenile offenders often can become intense. Herbst says that most adult offenders struggle to establish positions in their children's lives upon release, while the juvenile offenders try to work out any resentment they might feel towards their parents.

The sessions also encourage what Herbst and Coffey call “parenting from a distance.” Adult offenders are encouraged to write and call their children to re-establish a presence in their lives.

“These inmates want to stay in touch with their children and their grandchildren,” Coffee says. “This program inspires them to take that extra step. They write cards to their families as they work on personal issues and they learn how to maintain communication with the important people in their lives.”

Letters that hit home

During some sessions, inmates write letters to the people in their lives that have hurt them the most; these letters are never mailed. Instead, offenders read them to their therapy group.

“These inmates are writing down the most painful experiences they have been through. We are capturing the greatest wounds of their lives. Through that process, we help them reflect on a life full of pain. That reflection is a key difference in an individual who allows themselves to be consumed by rage versus one who makes a change in their behaviors and lifestyle,” says Herbst.

According to Herbst, the group therapy setting allows inmates to share their feelings in a productive, rather than destructive, way. By sharing their most painful memories with each other, offenders begin to open up and find new friends behind bars as well.

“Our inmates change after these classes,” says Coffey. “They learn how to deal with personal relationships and they learn how to think situations through and react positively rather than negatively. Our hope is that when these offenders are released, they will make a better adjustment when they return to the community and their families.”

As more corrections facilities welcome therapeutic programs like Herbst's, he hopes they will continue to focus on the offenders' emotional change.

“Men, particularly, are embracing this program because they are not afraid to admit where they are in their lives,” he says. “They embrace this because it enables them to change, and it resonates within their hearts. This is how we can heal a violent attacker, or an inmate who has acted out. We are teaching these men to respond with their minds instead of violence.”

Resource:

Bethesda Family Services Foundation: http://www.bfsf.org/