Abstract
James B Waldram, Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2012; 261 pp.: 9780520272569, $65 (cloth), $29.95 (pbk)
James B. Waldram, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan, has had the unique opportunity to spend 18 months in a Canadian prison observing, following and communicating with incarcerated men as they undertook a prison treatment program for sex offenders. Waldram’s ethnography of the Hound Pound – the term inmates have coined their treatment unit in reference to the prison slang hound for a sex offender – successfully provides a richly textured description of the sex offender’s experience of treatment. Unlike the monsters we read or hear about in the news media, the sex offenders we encounter in this book appear as real and complex individuals, men who have committed terrible acts but who are also struggling individually, in group therapy and in conversation with Waldram, to meet treatment expectations by reflecting on their lives, what caused them to offend and how best to remain crime free.
Central to Waldram’s ethnography is the conceptualization of prison treatment programs as processes of ‘habilitation’, rather than rehabilitation (pp. 11, 225). In the idea of rehabilitation, Waldram reminds us, is the attempt to restore the individual to a prior state where there was no crime, disorder or dysfunction, a time when all was good. Since in reality there is no such original state for the offender to return to, Waldram’s term ‘habilitation’, while somewhat clumsy, is meant to indicate that treatment works at creating someone new, a prudent individual who poses no risk to society. Treatment as ‘habilitation’ is then primarily for the benefit of society; it works at making the sex offender safe to be among us. The essence of ‘habilitation’, Waldram argues, is a therapy that makes our lives rather than their lives better (p. 225).
This transformation of the sex offender into a safe individual relies on disciplinary techniques orchestrated by a therapeutic approach known as cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. CBT, as it is employed in the Hound Pound, assumes that sex offenders essentially suffer from cognitive distortions and thinking errors that cause them to commit sexual crimes. To help offenders reflect on how their long-standing beliefs, thoughts and values affect and distort their emotional state and eventually lead them to act out, the treatment program described in Waldram’s book is structured around three performative components: the presentation of an autobiography; a crime cycle; and a relapse prevention plan. In all three components, inmates are carefully coached, rigorously scrutinized and ruthlessly confronted by staff and peers to present and stick to a life narrative devoid of any form of justification, minimization or denial. Treatment thus expects the individual to recast his life story in a narrative dominated by accountability and responsibility. His criminal behavior must be articulated in a discourse of personal agency: he made bad choices due to cognitive, affective and moral deficits (p. 58).
Waldram’s critical examination of the way CBT fashions the men’s personal narratives through the performance of the three mentioned components of the program raises serious questions about the value of treatment for sex offenders. While the men initially rely on personal memory to write their life story, they soon get confronted by an institutional memory, inscribed in their correctional files, that together with the principles of CBT become the forensic truth against which their narratives are evaluated. Therapeutic success depends then on replacing personal narratives – usually filled with contextual information that provide reasons for the men’s actions – with the facts of the correctional file that must be articulated in terms of thoughts and emotions that reflect personal accountability and responsibility. Inmates are usually unfamiliar with the documents contained in their correctional files, and if acquainted with them they are unlikely to fully agree with their content. It is not surprising that initially they show resistance to the imposition of a paradigmatic mode of narrating their life. As Waldram shows though, in most cases this resistance is eventually followed by a preoccupation to learn the Hound Pound Narrative mainly in order to get a successful treatment evaluation. As Waldram’s interview data and review of cognitive studies indicate, however, it is not possible to recall thoughts and emotions of events that might have happened many years ago and often under condition of intoxication. Shallow acceptance and manipulation of a sequence of events involving thoughts, emotions and criminal actions come to replace what could have been an honest attempt at making meaning out of a lived life. Waldram sees in the men’s move towards treatment compliance and effectiveness a significant opportunity to gain real therapeutic insight into their life gone awry.
Hound Pound Narrative is sure to be of interest to readers of this journal. While the book’s theoretical orientation revolves around narrative studies and medical and psychological anthropology, it provides a thick description of the fabrication of the sex offender into homo prudens, a figure that has become emblematic of current penal practices of care and control in a risk-averse society.