Labeling Clients and education

Just thoughts.  Really incoherent thoughts:

I'm thinking about the "How Offenders Transform Their LIves" reading in a pedagogical frame.  It's hard.  Here these counselors are--trying to help out these "clients" by ways of telling them to "look inside themselves" to see whether or not they've "changed".  But at the same time, these offenders want guidance--want people to give them a go and label that says that they're going to be okay or on the road to being delabeled.  In other words, how do you guide people while still empowering them?

Quote:
"'Readiness' is clearly a complicated negotiation between clients and counselors. Clients are told that the change has to happen from within themselves, yet client self-declarations of 'being ready' are not enough to quality as evidence of success." (Shadd Maruna, Thomas P LeBel, Michelle Naples and Nick Mitchell)

Maybe my problem with their analysis is the issue that the counselors seem to be having in attempting to assist these inmates: Isn't it a problem that we're solely concerned with the labels being imposed onto the offenders?  Sure, they're the ones who we are mainly concerned with, but to identify what titles they place on the counselors would 1) reveal what issues they may have with the process of being "readied" and 2) in a way, give them a place to actually label others/give them a place to become more confident in their own abilities.

This is a little too short.  I'll come back to this.