APAC: Brazil’s Restorative Justice Prisons
From the blog entry from Lorrenn Walker: On July 5 & 6, 2010, I visited two APAC prisons (Associacao de Protecao e Assistencia aos Condenados in English translated as: Association for Protection and Assistance of Convicts) in the city of Itauna, state of Minas Gerias, Brazil. The original APAC prison, which was in San Paulo, Brazil was reportedly the “first contemporary prison” to totally apply a faith-based approach to all parts of prison administration. (See: “Prison Religion: Faith Based reform and the Constitution”, Sullivan, 2009, emphasis in the original, p. 247).
...The atmosphere of the Itauna APAC prisons is different from the many others that I have visited on five different continents. While some prisons are labeled “correctional” institutions, like Hawai’i state prisons, APAC prisons are truly places of rehabilitation. They are not like most prisons including the state of Hawai’i, which sadly teach many people how to be better criminals through inhumane and barbaric environments (See: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo, 2008, which I wrote a blog about).
APAC’s approach is opposite to most prisons. Instead of making the people incarcerated in them feel bad, guilty, and like failures, APAC works to make people feel worthy, respected, and able to restore their lives. APAC gives people hope that they can contribute something to help others and that they can be of service in some way, no matter what their situation.
APAC’s restorative approach begins with the name it uses to refer to the people who live in these prisons. Instead of calling the people inmates or prisoners, APAC calls themrecuperandos because they are “people in the process of rehabilitation.” The late Insoo Kim Berg, co-founder of solution-focused brief therapy, would have loved this name recuperandos because she recognized the importance of language and how our labels influence behavior and our experiences.
Read the full article.
