Specialists in therapeutic communities, prison management, and forensic psychiatry offer insights into current models of community therapy. Illustrating the strategies to design and implement an effective therapeutic community environment in a correctional setting, this book presents a retrospective look at the history of therapeutic community environments. Prison guards as human service workers, inmate participation in program design, and confrontation strategy are some of the factors analyzed to reveal the cooperative efforts taken to ensure a sense of community and collective common good. Fundamental theories of building such a community are reviewed, and innovative techniques used in progressive prison settings are introduced and examined. Other topics covered are the concept of therapeutic milieu and the desirable features of a therapeutic community, especially in terms of open and closed prison systems. In addition, several therapeutic community programs and their operating assumptions are described. These include the experiment at Chino Prison in California, which demonstrated that the therapeutic community method had more success in changing antisocial behavior than other inmate programs; the coercive milieu therapy as practiced in the Social Therapy Unit at Penetang, Canada; and the conservation camp for convicted young offenders at Camp Brighton in Michigan. The application of democratic principles in prison therapeutic communities is examined, and a dialog between participants at a conference on therapeutic communities is included. Finally, a discussion of therapeutic communities from the viewpoint of a prison administrator is appended. Chapter notes are provided. For individual papers, see NCJ 72430-72438.