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Proposing Forgiveness Therapy for those in Prison: An Intervention Strategy for Reducing Anger and Promoting Psychological Health

Robert Enright, Tomaz Erzar, Maria Gambaro, Mary Cate Komoski, Justin O’Boyle, Gayle Reed, Jacqueline Song, Mark Teslik, Brooke Wollner, Zhuojun Yao, Lifan Yu

We propose a novel approach to corrections, both in maximum security prisons for adults and juvenile detention centers for adolescents. It is our hypothesis that unjust treatment from others can lead to inner pain, which can lead to anger. Unresolved anger can deepen and linger, turning to what we call excessive anger, compromising one’s psychological health and behavior. Excessive anger can turn to rage (very intense, potentially violent anger) which can fuel crime, a lack of cooperation within the prison system, and increased recidivism rates. When the excessive anger is caused by unjust behavior from others, prior to a person’s crime, conviction, and imprisonment, then we can reduce and even eliminate the excessive anger through the empirically-verified treatment of Forgiveness Therapy. It is rare, in our experience, for prison rehabilitation to have those in prison look backward, toward the injustices that happened to them prior to the crime. When they are given the chance to do this, they have the opportunity, perhaps for the first time, to confront the injustice and to heal from the pain and anger resulting from the unjust actions against them that might have happened years ago, even in childhood. Forgiveness Therapy may be one of the few existing mental health approaches which offer the opportunity to be free of excessive anger, perhaps for the first time in the person’s life. Research on Forgiveness Therapy with an imprisoned sample of youth in Korea is described as are two individual cases of men within a maximum security facility.