Connections and Corrections: Women in the Criminal Justice System and their Families

 

Organizer:  Ruth Campbell

Date: Jun 23, 2018

Time: 10:00 am - 11:30 am

Location:  Washburn Library, 5244 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55419

This presentation is a review of a qualitative study of eighteen women who were in a women’s residential correctional facility. Bowen family systems theory was used as the theoretical base for designing interviews of the women. Bowen family systems theory views the family as an emotional unit and uses systems theory to describe its complex interactions. Family and personal information gathered at the time of the initial interviews was reviewed ten years later to look for similarities/differences in functioning between those with and without subsequent legal charges. The results were reported in ‘Family Systems Forum,’ a publication of the Center for the Study of Natural Systems and the Family in Houston, Texas.

Ruth Campbell is a retired clinical social worker with an MSW from the University of Iowa. She did postgraduate training in Bowen family systems theory and therapy from the Minnesota Institute of Family Dynamics (which closed in 1995) and The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in Washington, D.C. (thebowencenter.org). She spent 32 years doing individual, couple, and family therapy in a private psychiatric practice and in the counseling department of Catholic Charities in Des Moines, Iowa and moved to Minneapolis in 2014.