Reading in Secure Settings

Abstract

This chapter offers two complementary perspectives on the practice of shared group reading in two distinctive secure contexts. Psychotherapist and policy-maker, Nick Benefield, former lead of the National Personality Disorder Team, recounts his successful introduction of Shared Reading groups within the criminal justice system—specifically as part of the environmental model of living, management and care known as PIPES, Psychologically Informed Planned Environments. Kathryn Naylor, a forensic psychiatrist at Ashworth (high-secure) Hospital, talks of her experience of running a Shared Reading group with patients who, because of what they have ‘missed’ or ‘lost’, present a grave danger to themselves or others. She speaks of reading’s special power to help patients find what ‘they do still have’ as an alternative to habitual self-harm as a reflex of inarticulate pain.