Recognition and Rehabilitation

In my Lifelong Learning class, we are reading Mark Bracher's Book, Radical Pedagogy 2006, which examines a psychoanalytic approach to learning.   Bracher talks about the importance of development and integration of three identity registers: affective-physiological (emotion), imagistic (body) and linguistic (language) for healthy identity formation.  These three registers are neither static nor distinct, but rather they are dynamic and fluid as they serve to either influence or impede learning.  The key to learning and development in these identity registers is recognition.  Recognition is the motivational force that determines most human activity including learning.  For example, wealth and material possessions are not ends in themselves but ways for us to be assured of recognition (p. 22).  In the same way, recognition is also the catalyst behind social problems including crime.  I would like to explore Bracher's theory of recognition and identity in the context of my experience working with female federal offenders.  (Please note that I have used female offender and woman/women interchangeably.)

 

In my current role as a parole officer, my job is to analyze the level of risk inmates present to themselves and society.  Once the risk areas are identified, the Correctional Intervention Board (CIB) makes recommendations for program interventions in an effort to reduce the identified risk areas.  There are seven risk areas that I assess: substance abuse, personal/emotional, associates, marital/family, attitude, community functioning and education/employment.  I have observed that it is very common for women offenders who have substance abuse problems to suffer from personal/emotional difficulties.  Personal/emotional issues usually include mental health problems brought on from past abuse experiences. Drugs and alcohol serve as coping mechanisms to numb painful  emotions.  The results impact and inhibit learning in every area of a woman offender's life including the other risk areas listed above.  For example, the average grade level of a female offender is grade 7.  The majority of female offenders has suffered damage to the personal/emotional risk area, which corresponds to Bracher's affective-physiological identity register.  


When the maladaptive coping mechanisms like mind-altering substances are  removed, raw emotions emerge and completely overwhelm many female offenders. The treatment offered to address emotional distress and the accompanying behavioural difficulties is Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT).  Female offenders voluntarily enter an intensive treatment unit called the Structured Living Environment (SLE) where they have in-class instruction and staff support to help them implement their new skills.  One of DBT's premises is to recognize the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviours.  For example, if I think that you are spreading rumours about me, I will dislike you and find some friends to help me beat you up.  The link between thoughts, feelings and behaviours seems like a simple concept, in that, once a woman can identify her hurt and angry feelings, she will be able to stop her acting-out behaviour.  However, I soon learned that many of the women could not make the link because they could not identify how they were feeling.

Bracher asserts that alexithymia, the inability to name one's affective-physiological states, is a major integrative deficiency that impacts on identity (p. 65).  "Being out of touch with one's feelings deprives one of the most fundamental evidence of one's ongoing being, the core of one's sense of self" (p. 65).  One of the ways to deal with overwhelming feelings that cannot be expressed is to alter one's mind with substances (p. 65).

DBT provides treatment tools to help the women offenders identify and understand their overwhelming emotions.  One of the treatment tools is called an Emotion Worksheet. The women offenders are encouraged to fill out these sheets whenever they experience an overwhelming emotion that they cannot identify.  The sheet prompts them to describe the emotion, the prompting event, their physical sensations, their action urges, the resulting behaviour(s), and their after-effect of the emotion.  Participation in the community of practice of the mental health unit allows the female offender to learn to feel her emotions as outlined in the reified worksheet.  

The understanding and feeling of emotions will help the emotionally-deficient woman offender develop her affective-physiological identity register.  The emotions will also serve as a function in the woman's day-to-day activities.  In his book, Emotional Intelligence 1995, Daniel Goleman makes reference to the emotional mind and the rational mind.  The emotional mind is impulsive and springs into action without consideration, whereas the rational mind is analytic, deliberate and slower to respond (p. 291).  DBT refers to the combination of the emotional mind and the rational mind as the wise mind.  The diagram below illustrates the wise mind as it intersects the emotional mind and the rational/reasonable mind.   

Support staff have a critical role to play as the woman offender begins her healing journey.  Staff recognize through validation the woman's efforts and any new pro-social behaviours.  The validation includes acknowledgement, encouragement, and social engagement.  When a woman in treatment exhibits maladaptive behaviours, staff disengage any social activity and are careful not to give negative attention.  Treatment tools are encouraged and staff interactions are matter-of-fact.  Typically, the woman expects and wants negative attention because it reaffirms her identity.  Bracher asserts that different people have different vitality affects, the feeling of aliveness, at the core of their identities.  For some, anger provides the greatest vitality affect (p. 46).  The challenge is to engage and validate the woman when she is demonstrating positive behaviours so that she can experience new vitality affects. 

Certainly, a prison is not the best place to learn and develop a new identity.  The loss of freedom and influences of a negative peer group automatically constitute prison as a negative learning environment.  It is quite common to see a female offender's affective-physiological register in opposition to a context of her imagistic or linguistic register, such as the oppositions between affects of tenderness and an identity-bearing signifier such as "tough" (Bracher, p. 60).  If a female offender has achieved recognition for being tough, she will perceive participation in programs as weak, even though she may want to get help.  Therefore, her identity is in conflict.

Recognition for positive behaviours will help female offenders as they journey on their long paths to healing.  As women offenders come to terms with their pasts without the aid of mind-altering substances, they learn to deal with and experience their unpleasant emotions.  As they enter into an intense treatment unit like the SLE community of practice and participate in DBT, the women learn how to integrate their affective-physiological states into their identity.  Although there are many challenges to learning, including conflict between identity registers, growth is possible.

Struggle for Identity

In my Lifelong Learning class, we recently watched the Academy Award-winning movie Crash, directed by Paul Haffis, 2004.  Our professor challenged us to watch the film from the perspective of how people learn and find identity within and between communities of practice. Set in present-day Los Angeles, several stories about racial and social tensions interweave within a two-day period and reflect how rigid boundaries reject the meanings of other cultures thereby creating creating conflict, stereotypes, and power struggles.  Sometimes individuals find themselves balancing membership within two competing communities of practice.  An ensuing struggle for identity occurs as individuals seek to find their place within each group.  

The movie, Crash, portrays how identity is impacted by the demands of multimembership within communities of practice that oppose each other. One character, Cameron is a very successful Hollywood film director, who happens to be African-American. His participation and success within his workplace has marginalized him within his own ethnic group. Rigid boundaries contribute to stereotypes and unfortunately the stereotype of a black man living in Los Angeles is not that of a successful film director. 

In his book, Communities of Practice 1998, Etienne Wenger says that full participation in one boundary often means marginalization in the other.  Being inside a community of practice implies, and is largely defined in terms of, being outside of the other community of practice.  Non-participation then is a defining constituent of participation. This situation makes boundary crossing difficult because each side is defined by opposition to the other and membership in one community implies marginalization in another. Multimembership requires some work to reconcile the different forms of membership that corresponds to a single identity (p. 159).

The resulting conflict of Cameron's multimembership within his family, work and ethnic group largely impacts on his  identity.  During an argument, Cameron's wife, Christine, tells him that he is not black because he does not know the hardships that come with being black in L.A.  At work, his colleague tells him that a black actor was not speaking “black enough" and he tells Cameron to shoot the scene again. These covert and subtle acts of racism are difficult for Cameron to process. As Cameron participates in his work practice, he moves further to the margins within his own ethnic group.

In contrast, the overt acts of a racist, white police officer redirects Cameron's trajectory  within his own oppressed cultural group.  Cameron's dignity and power are taken away when he is pulled over for a supposed traffic violation.  Under the guise of a pat-down search, Officer Ryan sexually molests Christine.  Ryan then gives Cameron and his wife the choice of being arrested for the traffic violation or apologizing to him and going home. Numb, Cameron decides to apologize and go home.  Later as he and his wife argue, it is clear that Cameron felt powerless because he is a black man up against a racist, white police officer with a gun.  Cameron's powerlessness caused him to identify more fully within his own cultural group.  He realized that his identity as a black man in L.A. left him powerless and that even his position of affluence as a successful film director could not afford his or his wife's dignity.

Later in the movie, Cameron comes face-to-face with black car-jackers who fit the cultural stereotype he has tried hard to escape.  It is interesting that Cameron chooses to fight back.  It could simply be that he has reached a breaking point, but I think there is significance in his action to fight the black men who try to steal his vehicle. In essence, he is fighting the stereotype he deals with everyday of his life both covertly and overtly. When the police come upon the fight, Cameron challenges them and refuses to submit to their commands thereby becoming the stereotype that the police expect. When the ordeal ends, Cameron tells the speechless car-jacker that he embarrasses both Cameron and himself.

In an interesting twist, Cameron then seeks to reclaim a part of his identity within his cultural group when he joins other black youth and men who are throwing garbage into a burning car. His experience of oppression causes him to fight back.  As a result, Cameron renegotiates his identity within his cultural group, leaves the margins and redirects his trajectory towards the centre of his cultural community of practice.   

Cameron's identity crisis causes him to constantly relocate his position within each community of practice's social landscape (p. 167).  In order to be successful at work, Cameron chooses not to participate within his cultural community of practice.  Wenger refers to non-participation as strategy whereby identity lays outside of his culture (p. 170).  Of course, Cameron's choice is dictated to him through the systemic racism referred to by Wenger as Institutional non-participation (p. 169).

Identities are not something we turn off and on (Wenger, 159).  We can act a certain way within one community of practice and a totally different way within another community of practice.  However, we carry our memberships with us and we constantly reconcile our different forms of membership within a single identity (p. 159).  For Cameron, reconciliation was difficult because he was a member within two opposing communities of practice.

Cameron's struggle rings true for many minorities throughout North America and Europe.  Cultural communities of practice have been stereotyped, which makes crossing over to other communities of practice difficult.  As seen in Cameron's case, the reconciliation work was not harmonious and the process was not done once and for all.  As long as racism continues to form divisions and rigid boundaries, multimembership will involve ongoing tensions that will never be resolved (p. 160).