Therapeutisation of the Penal System in West Germany, 1961-1985: The Case of North Rhine-Westphalia

• Applicant: Dr. Marcel Streng
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2022 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508783012

When the prison system is currently discussed in the media, it is often from contradictory perspectives. On the one hand, the prison system is criticised for not being secure enough, for example when a prisoner who is considered particularly dangerous manages to escape. On the other hand, the prison system is criticised just as harshly when a prisoner commits suicide because it did not provide him with the therapeutic help necessary for his social rehabilitation. Increased security and therapeutic help seem to mutually exclude each other. The project examines such problematisations of the penal system from a historical perspective. The project is based on the assumption that the prison system – just like other areas of contemporary society at the same time - was caught up in a process of therapeuticisation that considerably changed social relations and self-relations in the field. Since prison policy was a matter for the states, using the case of the justice administration of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. the project aims to show how socio- and psychotherapeutic knowledge spread in the prisons and their administration, which treatment practices fell in line and what the consequences were. The aim of the project is, on the one hand, on the one hand, to historicise reform policy measures in the penal system and the narratives of their ›success‹ or ›failure‹, and on the other hand, to relate prison-specific developments to the context of the »therapeutisation of the social« in West Germany, Western Europe and the USA since the mid-1960s. The research project hs four goals. First, it will contribute to the history of the prison system in West Germany after 1945. Unlike in the case of psychiatry and children’s homes in West Germany, or political imprisonment in the former GDR, research in contemporary history oft the prison is still in its infancy. Second, the study sheds light on the still highly controversial problem of how offenders are and should be dealt with in closed institutions from a contemporary historical perspective. This concerns the extensive range of (psycho)therapeutic procedures and social assistance, but also the treatment of those inmate who refuse to collaborate. Thirdly, the study contributes to the history of the »therapeutisation of the social« since the end of the 1960s, i.e. especially the establishment and expansion of psy-scientific expert services and the penetration of psychological knowledge, therapeutic procedures and counselling techniques into the prison system. Fourthly, from the perspective of medical history, the discussion about »de-medicalisation« is historicised, since it is about the takeover and change of forensic psychiatric tasks by psychologists, therapists and social workers in the penal system in the 1970s.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants