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"A home for research
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Latest update to site: June 6, 2008
Thesis submitted to obtain the degree of Master in Educational Sciences(Orthopedagogics)
Ghent University, Belgium
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Academic year 1998-1999
Translation by Dieuwke Twinberrow
Part of a manuscript originally written in 1965, and updated in 1999/2000. It contains a personal account of a period of experimentation and innovation in the California penal system which began with the war-time election of Earl Warren as Governor of California in 1943, and effectively came to an end when Ronald Reagan became Governor in 1966.
1. OVERVIEW (Introduction to the documents) (312KB) Adobe Acrobat required [Download Acrobat Reader (Free) 5.6 MB]
Part One consists of a Foreword prepared for the original document by the late Richard A. McGee in 1965, when he was Administrator of the Youth and Adult Corrections Agency for the State of California; an updated Preface, looking back at the projects, followed by the Introduction to the original manuscript; and a Sequel. The latter contains Dennie Briggs's brief reflections on the current state of penal reform - or its absence - in the U.S. and the contribution that these pioneering efforts in California nearly 40 years ago might make to current thinking and practice of the therapeutic community approach in prisons.
2. BEYOND THE DEVIL'S HOLE: Forestry Camp Communities (1.02MB) Adobe Acrobat required [Download Acrobat Reader (Free) 5.6 MB]
Part Two is a description of two Forestry Camp transitional therapeutic communities. From 1960 to 1961, Maxwell Jones, while Visiting Commonwealth Professor of Social Psychiatry at Stanford University, gave the prestigious Issac Ray Lectures at the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association - its first Lecturer, incidentally, from another country. In Lecture Four, Dr. Jones reviewed the prevailing status of psychiatry with regards to criminal justice in Britain and the U.S. He cited the research then being conducted into treatment modes for felons by the California Department of Corrections and detailed a prototype for the application of the therapeutic community approach in prisons. Richard McGee retained Maxwell Jones as a consultant examining the overall rehabilitation programs for the state’s department, and assisting in establishing the approach he suggested, in a series of pilot projects. Dennie Briggs was given the task of laying the groundwork, establishing the culture, training the staff, and consulting in these projects.
The early transitional therapeutic community projects began in 1960, in a state forestry service-affiliated fire-fighting and conservation camp in Southern California’s San Bernadino Mountains. This was Conservation Camp Pilot Rock, and consisted of 100 youthful, adult first offenders, with Correctional Officers, and Counselors, living and working together as an extension of the California Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry. After it was established, it was moved in 1961 to a site adjacent to the California Institution for Men (C.I.M.) at Chino, named Camp Don Lugo. In closer proximity to the home prison, Camp Don Lugo ran as a transitional therapeutic community from 1961 to 1965, at the termination of the original terms of the research proposal.
3. PAINTED DEVILS: Prison Communities (1.13MB) Adobe Acrobat required [Download Acrobat Reader (Free) 5.6 MB]
Part Three describes the creation of two transitional therapeutic communities within the grounds of the Chino prison itself. Where the Forestry Camps were relatively independent units, physically separated from the main prison at Chino, the Pine Hall Project, initiated in 1959, was an attempt to construct a community for youthful offenders within the precincts of a much larger prison containing 2,000 inmates - an increasingly autonomous unit in a sense, but sharing work, leisure and other facilities with the prison at large.
The second of the prison-based projects, built on the Forestry Camp and Pine Hall models, was pioneered in 1961 both at San Quentin Prison in Northern California by Dr. Harry Wilmer, and, later in the year, at Chino. These projects, under the title of Programs for Increased Correctional Effectiveness (known as I.C.E.), mainly for the older more recalcitrant offender, were then extended to six other prisons, the total program being financed by diverting funds from the construction of an additional 1,200 unit prison. This program concluded in 1966, when the political atmosphere within California itself in relation to crime rehabilitation changed abruptly.
This document highlights activities related to the therapeutic community established by Dr. Harry A. Wilmer, whose workplace was the U.S. Naval Hospital, Oakland, California from July, 1955 to April, 1956. To my knowledge, this project was the first therapeutic community established in North America. I have drawn freely from various publications by Dr. Wilmer and other staff members. Many are located in military medical journals and reports which are not readily available outside specialized medical libraries or data banks. The best single reference, of course, is Dr. Wilmer's book, Social Psychiatry in Action: A Therapeutic Community, written in 1958.
This document summarizes the experiences of a program carried out at the Yokosuka [pronounced yo-KOOS-ka] Naval Hospital begun by a team who had been trained during the experiment at the Oakland California, Naval Hospital in 1955-1956, described Online Publication 2, above.
A large percentage of the patients received in Oakland were evacuated by air from Yokosuka; many arrived in disturbed conditions aggravated by prior treatment at that hospital and during the long evacuation from the Far East in restraint and under heavy sedation. A team consisting of a psychiatric nurse, three neuropsychiatric technicians, and the writer, a clinical psychologist, volunteered to be transferred to Yokosuka. We wanted to see what could be done to humanize conditions on the psychiatric wards where emotional disturbances were first recognized, to help patients exert greater self-control of their behavior, and begin to take responsibility for modifying it. This is the story of that experiment.
Children who come from economically and socially disadvantaged families meet with a sense of defeat early in life—an experience that often intensifies as they grow older. Their frustration begins in school and frequently shows up as aggressive and disruptive behavior.
Furthermore their learning styles are very often not suited to the typical teacher-led type of instruction. This pattern of failure culminates when they attempt to move into the middle-class, competitive world where advancement is dependent on achieving employable skills, many of which are acquired through formal education. Typically, they are forced to take jobs at the most marginal levels, or can find none at all.
The 1960s brought optimism and hope that something could be done to alleviate social and economic conditions and thus extend the American dream to those people who had previ- ously not had a chance. During the summer of 1965, one of the first demonstration projects funded under the “War on Poverty” pro-vided the means to temporarily change the structure of an elemen-tary school so that children could have new opportunities for learning. There was a national shortage of credentialed teachers and a high rate of unemployment especially among minority groups. Dr. James Hartley, the Dean of Extension of the University of California at Riverside sponsored a project that could simultaneously address these concerns.
Thirty two adults and youths (school drop-outs, parents, high school and col-lege students) were trained and employed as assistant teachers to work in teams with eight credentialed teachers in a summer enrichment program for approximately 200 children (mostly Black and Latino), living in a distressed rural area. 2 Background. The form this project was to take came largely from my discomfort with teacher training (beginning with my own) and the need to open up new avenues for innovation in education.
The project was to be both an experiment and a demonstration of how the assets of a typical elementary school could be enhanced through restructuring its methods of instruction and administration, along with addittional resources. Obstructions to learning often arise from basic problems in communication. Teachers, more likely than not, come from middle-class backgrounds which in itself presents difficulties in understanding children from other cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. In addition, age differences between adult teachers and young children are not always conducive to understanding and communicating. And inherently there is the underlying matter of authority and its use (or abuse) in the teaching situation In sum, we were looking for more effective ways to make education play a more vital part in the lives of these children.
Change can include methods, ideas, and/or practices in teaching and learning, in institutions and in the participants. With regard to people, change can occur in thinking in the form of attitudes and values, and/or behavior, i.e., action and relation-ships. Demonstration projects allow people to be “doers,” those “done to”, or spectators. There can thus be participation or not. There are, however, innumerable resistances and inertia to change; a good deal of “future shock” is to be expected when different methods are broached.
Such was the Val Verde Project, a primary summer school in 1965, for 200 economically disadvantaged children, mainly Black and Latino living in a rural area of Southern California. The project - described in "4. In School: Creating a Learning Community" above - introduced a variety of assistant teachers in teaching teams, with a specific kind of leadership and short term commitment (i.e. six to eight weeks). Specialized human relations training, with constant feedback from several sources (a daily total staff seminar, team meetings and a Change and Development Team of trained observers) enabled individuals and teams to obtain an extensive look at their behavior and overall functioning. Not burdened by required curricula, the participants were free to explore ways to enhance the learning process itself as the “content” for change. The result was an emerging system for learning; a different model for operating a small primary school resembling the “social learning” concept of Maxwell Jones.
This document is concerned with after effects of the Val Verde Project in terms of its contagion to other projects and programs spawned from the original design. Its application to additional situations and populations will be shown along with further training and opportunities for people who participated in the original project and others who became involved.
A number of immediate and long range results came from this project. There was continued training for the parent assistant teachers so that they could maximize their skills and impart them to others. University extension courses for teachers were developed. Some of these teachers experimented, perfected new programs and took new directions from the clues found in the project. One of the project teachers, for example, incorporated peer-led instruction in his class and combined it with peer observation functions similar to those the Change and Development Team had originated. As a means of more accurate observation, I explored combining technology, namely video tape and closed circuit television, with peer-led instruction and group discussion.
Maxwell Jones, who had been a consultant in the demonstration project, visited the various classrooms where these new approaches were being tried out. As it happened, he was moving more into education, broadening his scope of social psychiatry and gaining information he would put into practice in schools in Scotland and later, when he retired, in Denver, Colorado.
This story is about about a group of students on one of the most volatile college campuses during the mid-1960s who were coping with the turbulent times while experimenting with different ways of learning and growing.
It was with sadness and relief that I boarded a University of California charter flight in San Francisco the night of September 11, 1968,bound for London. I was burned-out from the series of events that had taken place over the past two years while I was on the faculty of San Francisco State College. At the same time those years had been some of the most exciting and challenging ones in my life —it was as if I had been on a continual “high.” Now I was beginning a self-imposed sabbatical for a year which I would start by spending the winter with Maxwell Jones at Dingleton Hospital in Scotland.
I needed a break and so took a month’s vacation in France. It began with a busman’s holiday in Paris where I spoke with students who had participated in the events of the previous May uprising at the Sorbonne and in Nanterre.
Now that all seems so long ago, but as I was writing this document, I turned on the television to get the early morning weather forecast. Instead, there were scenes of the World Trade Center where reportedly an air liner had just crashed into one of its towers. I watched in disbelief as a second plane crashed into the other tower.And then, in horror, I saw the two giant buildings collapse.
By this time I thought perhaps a Hollywood film was being shown for some strange reason — similar to Orson Welles’ Mercury Radio Theater production of H.G.Wells’ fantasy, “War of the Worlds,” which aired on Halloween night in 1938. I was old enough to have heard this program and didn’t realize until later that it was a spoof. It has remained vividly in my mind ever since.
While the details unfolded in the days following the September 11, 2001 disaster, I was again reminded of the tumultuous events that took place in the 1960s on campuses throughout Europe and the United States. At that time the U.S.was waging another war —in Vietnam. Students were joined by activists in an all out protest against social and economic conditions; they were calling for fundamental changes.
Many of their concerns parallel those of today’s terrorists: exploitation of labor from poor countries, use of the military to insure our commercial interests and spread our ideologies throughout the world, along with ruthless attempts to develop global markets for our products.
Yet, I wondered how many of those same protesting students (now in their 50s and 60s )had abandoned their idealism, joined the establishment, and, at the present time, were promoting the very institutions and practices that they so vigorously opposed back then.
This story, however, is not about those students. Their activities were merely a backdrop against which another group of young people, on one of the most volatile campuses during those years, coped with the times while experimenting with different ways of learning and growing. Some did participate in social action along with their studies and learned from it. Others were somewhat able to isolate themselves from their surroundings. For all of us, the learning experience was a rich and rewarding one,although exhausting.
As I have reached the age when, as a friend so cogently put it, I can recall events that never happened, I have relied on sources other than memory (notes that I kept, copies of reports and proposals, letters, tape recordings and the book that San Francisco State College’s President John Summerskill wrote documenting his experiences during those two troubled years) in an attempt to reconstruct those times, the mid-1960s, now so long ago, as I saw them.
As the name implies, a Youth Action Team is oriented in an organized way to develop and carry out projects, large and small, using a program development model.
Overview: The Industry of Discovery
1. Training Youth for Participation in School Improvement (California) 8
2. Project Learning: An Exploration (Chicago) Teams two to five.33
3. Team Seven: Youth Employment in Australia 66
Educational Priorities of Young People in the 1980s 71
National Youth Policy: A Framework for Young People to Contribute to Society 76
4. United Nations Expert Group on Training for Youth participation 82
Guidelines for Training Youth Workers (Vienna) 85
5. Globalization of Youth: 6th International Youth Forum (Seoul, Korea) 92
Toward a Youth Social Ecology 103
Notes & References 112
Appendices Ernest Wenk: Models of Youth Participation 116
Willie Stapp: The Youth Legislative News Bureau 119
As I thought back over 50 years of Therapeutic Community Experience I began to reflect on how we at Fulbourn had learned “to do it”, how to operate therapeutic communities; how a varied group of people from several professions – medicine, nursing, social work, O.T., and none - had learned to operate this new, exciting and rewarding way of working in an institution.
In this essay I recall some memories of how I personally learned about therapeutic communities, and some of the ways that others such as my friends and colleagues at Fulbourn went about learning to operate Therapeutic Communities. The story has been told before, but I have never before tried to set out the process of learning.
THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY MEMORIES: How we learned to operate Therapeutic Communities
For decades the name of Maxwell Jones was dominant in Therapeutic Communities. He had founded and operated the most famous therapeutic community, at Belmont Hospital. We had all been to see it; we had read his books; he had visited our hospitals. Though he died in 1990 his name is still linked indissolubly with the concept.
And yet Max did much more than found the first and best therapeutic community....
THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY MEMORIES: Maxwell Jones
Although there are papers describing some of the things that we did at Fulbourn Hospital, many experiments were never published. Notable amongst those were the meetings for the doctors that were held every Friday morning from 1966 to 1979. Some of us regarded these as our most important meeting of the week, and a setting in which we had valuable growth experiences. Certainly all visiting doctors found them surprising, and many made enthusiastic comments. The first Royal College Accreditation team spoke very highly of what they thought the doctors were learning from them; though subsequent teams became critical as they became more academic and training orientated.
In 2002 Ross Mitchell and I attempted to put together something of what we had learned from this wonderful experience, and I attach these papers in an attempt to give some flavour of how it was. The first paper is a history of the meeting as given in extracts from my book "The Story of a Mental Hospital; Fulbourn 1858-1983. The second is an explanatory letter for newcomers to the meeting (and the hospital) drafted in 1974. The next two are personal reminiscences of the meeting, by myself and Ross Mitchell. ......
THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY MEMORIES: The Fulbourn Hospital Doctors' Meeting
In the Spring of 2005 the Council of Cambridge Group Work asked me to give a talk about my years of work in group and social psychiatry in Cambridge. I accepted hesitantly, since it was a long time since I had spoken in public. But gradually, I warmed to the task. I delivered the paper quite satisfactorily on 29th June 2005.
It had started as rambling reminiscences of some 60 years of experience, and I enjoyed sharing memories with people who had taken part in many of the stirring episodes that we had seen in Cambridge. As the paper developed, however, I was led to reflect on the whole phenomenon of social psychiatry, quite unknown when I began in psychiatry in the 1940s, but by 2005 a major and irreplaceable part of psychiatric practice in diagnosis and various forms of psychotherapy. This further led me to reflect on the fluctuating fortunes of various kinds of approaches and therapy that I have seen in psychiatry during my professional lifetime - the triumphant rise of the physical therapies - insulin coma therapy, electroplexy, leucotomy, carbon dioxide therapy, etc. - and their almost total extinctions; the rise in the various pharmacological therapies, and in many cases their later discrediting - the barbiturates, the amphetamines, the phenothiazines; the tremendous rise of psycho-analysis in the immediate post war period, and its gradual decline into a minor speciality by the end of the century; and to wonder what it was that had caused these various forms of approach to mental illness and its therapy to rise and fall so strikingly. It also led me to reflect on the few forms of treatment that had persisted for more than a decade, such as electroplexy and the major anti-psychotic tranquillisers. I realised that various forms of social therapy had also seen a rise and fall, though many were still potent; and I began to associate some of these rises and falls not so much with the thinking of psychiatrists or the inventions of the chemist but the demands of the society in which we were practising our trade - which at times supported and applauded what we did, and at other times castigated us and regulated and limited what we tried to do. I have tried to put all these ruminations into reasonable shape, and offer them hesitantly as some reflections of an old man looking back a long way.
SIXTY YEARS OF SOCIAL PSYCHIATRY, 1945-2005
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This page authored by: Craig Fees