Houses of Healing
for adults in prison and jail
Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom, with its workbook companion, Making Time Count, offers an engaging, research-driven prison program for behavioral change, emotional healing, and successful rehabilitation and reentry.
Program Highlights
Houses of Healing Overview
A cornerstone of jail and prison programming for 30 years.
The Houses of Healing Program is a powerful 13-session social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum created specifically for incarcerated individuals. The centerpiece of the program is the book, Houses of Healing: A Prisoners Guide to Inner Power and Freedom, designed to offer skillful guidance and equip participants with the tools to:
- Learn emotion regulation, stress-management techniques, and mindfulness meditation
- Acquire cognitive-behavioral skills to reframe challenging situations and alter life-long patterns of violence and addiction
- Acknowledge, work with, and heal childhood trauma
- Transform anger, resentment, and unhealthy guilt and shame
- Explore and heal grief
- Acknowledge the impact of crime, build victim awareness, and take responsibility for offending behavior
- Work with and adopt forgiveness as a practical strategy
- Nurture spiritual growth
More than 200,000 Houses of Healing resources, including the Houses of Healing book, have been distributed in state and federal prisons as well as larger county jails nationwide with approximately half of these distributed free of charge. Programs based on Houses of Healing have been the centerpiece of five “Innovative Grant” programs serving more than 1,000 incarcerated men in the CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over the past five years.
Houses of Healing was included in the First Step Act (FSA) Approved Programs Guide of 2018 published by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The FSA Approved Programs Guide is a collection of the BOP’s robust reentry programs, designed to ensure all incarcerated individuals have the skills necessary to succeed upon release.
Incarcerated individuals and prison staff nationwide praise the power of Houses of Healing which has transformed the face of programming in hundreds of prisons and has been a cornerstone of jail and prison programs.
Who Houses of Healing Helps
Houses of Healing is specifically written to address the emotional, social, behavioral, and spiritual growth and development of those involved in the criminal justice system. The Houses of Healing Program offers a transformative approach to helping individuals create lives of purpose and dignity whether they remain inside the prison walls or return to the community.
One formerly incarcerated individual describes how he has changed as a result of Houses of Healing serving as a successful reentry program.
Why Lionheart's Prison Program Works
Using a proven combination of bibliotherapy, mindfulness-based techniques, and cognitive behavioral skills, the Houses of Healing prison program provides a path to behavioral change, dignity, and respect for oneself and for others. Program participants learn evidence-based skills to cope with the stress of incarceration, manage conflict in healthy ways, and reduce recidivism. The program also addresses many of the issues that lead to an individual’s incarceration including the lasting impact of early childhood trauma and the legacies of intergenerational abuse, incarceration, and substance use.
In addition to guiding participants through the process of taking responsibility for offending behavior, the program also highlights the necessity of self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others – subjects that are often overlooked and misunderstood despite their well documented link to the cultivation of empathy and emotional maturity.
Program Resources
The Houses of Healing Program includes a range of materials allowing it to be flexibly used across different populations and settings and with programs with varied needs.
The Houses of Healing resources include (click on image to learn more):
(English)
(Spanish)
Integral support for Houses of Healing (English)
Integral support for Houses of Healing (Spanish)
Integral support for Houses of Healing
(English)
Offers a complete guide to group facilitation
Assists in the delivery of the program
Ways to Utilize Houses of Healing
Houses of Healing offers considerable flexibility in how it can be utilized with a range of resources supporting varied implementation approaches. The Houses of Healing program can be used:
- By simply reading the book and reflecting on the exercises.
- As a 13-session program/intervention delivered with the guidance offered in the Houses of Healing Facilitator's Manual.
Houses of Healing has been taught by hundreds of corrections professionals, mental health and substance abuse counselors, chaplains, prison volunteers, and increasingly by mature incarcerated individuals with long term sentences. - As a 13 session self study course offered through the Making Time Count Workbook, in conjunction with the Houses of Healing book.
- Can be used in groups in general population, but also lends itself to self-study programming for segregated and restricted housing
- As an adjunct to individual work and groups focusing on life skills, anger management, violence prevention, victim impact and restorative justice, recovery treatment, and reentry programs as well as other focused interventions and individual counseling.
- As a comprehensive, interactive, self-paced eLearning Program delivered on tablets.
Many prison staff, including chaplains, embrace the Houses of Healing prison program because it is infused with an inclusive spirituality meant to increase participants’ social, emotional, and spiritual maturity.
Programming to Restrictive Housing Units Nationwide
Lionheart's National Solitary Project is an initiative in which Lionheart is partnering with state and federal prisons throughout the U.S. to make this acclaimed, evidence-informed program available to incarcerated individuals who are in highly restricted housing units (equivalent to solitary confinement, administrative segregation (AdSeg) or special housing units).
Lionheart is, for a limited time, providing the Houses of Healing Self-study Course (the Houses of Healing book and Making Time Count workbook) at no cost. Through this initiative, Lionheart has partnered with over 15 state Departments of Corrections and served more than 1,500 individuals in solitary confinement.
Houses of Healing Research
Research and ongoing program evaluation are critical components of ensuring that the Houses of Healing resources are not only effective, but are revised to incorporate the growing body of knowledge in the fields of social emotional learning, trauma, and victim-offender impact treatment. Check out the peer-reviewed Houses of Healing research articles.