Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Finding Meaning In A Restricted Environment, Kent Craig

Kent Craig

Social workers face many ethical and theoretical challenges in their work to improve quality of lives for individuals and work toward a more just and equitable society. One of the most challenging of these dilemmas is how to work within restrictive and authoritarian institutions such as prisons, juvenile detention centers and some mental institutions. This paper will discuss how social workers can provide treatment in settings where barriers to trust, recovery and hope are ever present and in which clients have difficulty identifying meaningful recovery-oriented goals. How do we find meaning in a restricted environment? An important aspect of the …