Pros
The Therapeutic Community concept would be very effective if it was managed as it was designed to be.
Cons
People in top positions there do not understand therapeutics, nor how to manage staff or run a therapeutic community. We were disrespected in what we were trying to accomplish with the inmates. Some of the counselors were unwilling to look at each as an individual and made all their interactions with them about outward behavior and not enough about healing trauma and changing generations of wrong thinking, so was ineffective for long-term recovery, in my opinion. Many of the inmates grew up in a culture of criminality and addictions and shortening the program from 1 year to 6 months (the new plan) was going to mean poorer outcomes. Many of them didn't start to WANT to change until after 6 months. The workload on the counselors kept increasing with narrowing windows of time to get things done and do real work with the inmates. Because management did not understand managing employees (I have a management degree and have worked in management myself), nor therapeutics, getting problems fixed was just not going to happen there. On top of that, there were so many security locks, tools on the internet we could have used for teaching our classes was blocked, even Ted Talks and You Tube. It was frustrating.