Why Do Prisoners Need Correctional Counselors?

“…over 11 million people cycle through local jails each year,” (Prison Policy Initiative 2015). Because of this constant transfer of people from the jailhouse to the real world, correctional counselors are definitely needed. The purpose of having correctional counselors is to help inmates process the transition from jail or prison back to the real world. This counseling gives inmates the opportunity to express their fears and obstacles they think they will have to face before actually being forced to face them. Correctional counselors are there to help inmates choose the right path before leaving jail or prison. This helps lower the amount of people that come back to jail or prison because they went back to doing what it was that got them put in jail the first time. In the early 21st century, the 1980’s to the early 2000’s, correctional counseling was more about making sure that inmates …show more content…
This makes them resort back to their old habits and lands them back in jail or prison. Using this kind of “…approach does not give clients ample opportunity to intrinsically explore and assume ownership of their maladaptive processes and to actively discover and create their own alternatives,” (Bland 2014). The inmate is left all alone in society with no reference for any other kind of counselor to go to and there is no way for them to go back to the correctional counselor once they have gone back into society. The inmate is practically forced to figure things out on their own after only a few meetings with a correctional counselor. This is one of the main reasons why people who have been to jail or prison previously end up going back. After a few meetings with a correctional counselor, the inmate has to make decisions without being fully ready to make those kinds of