OS with justicial authorities

[Lisa Heft]

Has anybody out there experience with OS for people working in justicial
authorities, courts or prisons?
- - -

Hello, Michael –

I have used Open Space for a regional gathering of correctional officers,
prison commanders, NGOs, prisoner family services groups, public health
workers, ex-inmates and others seeking to share experiences and resources.

We would love to do Open Space ‘inside’ with state prisoners at two of the
prisons I work with, but of course you cannot do anything that to a guard
observing from outside the room look like chaos.  ;o)  ...which is exactly
what Open Space may seem...

I have held discussion circles with prisoners in sort of a
post-your-own-topic-of-passion method.  The guards seem to be okay with
seeing one ‘free staff’ sitting with a circle full of inmates, and they seem
to also be okay with a room full of inmates posting things if they can also
see enough ‘free staff’ mingling among them.  So the idea of one
facilitator-type only in an Open Space might not look so good through the
window.  But with enough ‘free staff’, I would imagine that visually the
circles of chairs would look fine.

Of course, there are always lots of things that close the space throughout
the day in a prison – alarms (when at ‘my’ prisons the inmates have to
crouch on the floor and the free staff have to all gather standing in view
of the guard), lock-downs (when everybody is shut into a unit and cannot
return for Day 2 of the Open Space), not everyone gets lunch to take with
them and we cannot pass out any food, etcetera.  But I still think that it
can be done and I am still planning to do one in future at the two prisons I
work with in California.

Then of course there is the idea which may be threatening to institutions
that the participants may come up with powerful new projects and
ideas...v-e-r-y scary when you are trying hard every day to take away
peoples’ power...

Plus, there is a great amount of illiteracy in prison, but we usually don’t
have any problem with that as enough in the group can tell the others what
is posted and we also make very sure to repeat and read a lot.  Of course
our colleague John and our other Haitian friends have done open space with
lower literacy participants by announcing topics and calling peoples’
attention to topics much like any traditional marketplace’s sellers would do
with their wares.

If it helps for any of your prison contacts to email me (I’m not an employee
of the prison but an outside facilitator/educator) please let them know I
would welcome exchanging ideas and experiences.  I am sure I could also put
them in contact with my colleague who is the executive director of a series
of inmate health and education programs in several prisons across the state.

Greetings from sunny Berkeley, California,

Lisa

- - -
L i s a   H e f t
Consultant, facilitator, educator
Open Space Technology and Experiential Learning

2325 Oregon
Berkeley, California
94705-1106  USA
(+01) 510 548-8449
lisaheft at pacbell.net
www.openspaceworld.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20020311/78914b6f/attachment-0010.htm>