Race and Power: The Potential and Limitations of Prison-Based Democratic Therapeutic Communities

Race and prisons are deeply intertwined in England and Wales and in other countries. Minority groups not only are overrepresented but also experience the weight and pain of imprisonment more acutely. However, democratic therapeutic community prisons such as HMP Grendon in the United Kingdom offer an alternative to mainstream imprisonment, using communal living as a means to explore psychotherapeutic issues in a humane and effective way. The primary aim of this article is to explore the potential and limitations of prison-based therapeutic communities in responding to individual needs and the wider structural constraints that shape race and ethnicity in contemporary society. The article sets out the context in which these communities operate, in particular the ways in which both prisons and clinical practice are implicated in the flow of racialized power. The article goes on to discuss the features of therapeutic communities that can challenge, confront, disentangle, and reorder aspects of power, inequality, and identity. The article concludes that while therapeutic communities do not provide a utopian answer to the structural problems of race and power, they do offer the potential for a more sensitive internal environment and enable individuals to act with conscious and considered agency in their own lives.