“Your Secrets Are Safe with me”: Opening Prison Counseling

Abstract

Prison counseling aims to aid inmate clients in understanding and solving problems by themselves, while problems that could be talked about or will be talked about during counseling are built on earlier sequences that occur in the opening of prison counseling. By focusing on 9 counseling sessions conducted in 2 different prisons in southern China and using discursive psychology as the methodological tool, this study explores how the police counselors open the counseling in order to prepare the inmate clients for the following troubles talk. The primary concern is how the police counselors construct prison counseling while attending to accountability issues.