Time To Think

Daphne Caruana Galizia finds out about a thinking course for prisoners

The last place you would expect to find somebody like Norman Darmanin Demajo (serious, accountant, well-balanced, married with kids) is prison. Yet he goes there once a week and spends the afternoon teaching thinking skills to those who are doing time. He's called this programme Time To Think for the obvious reason that, in jail, there isn't much else to do.

Norman's inspiration is, as though you hadn't already guessed, Edward de Bono, the thought guru of our times. His interest was caught by a 'thinking tools' course, which he followed assiduously, and then wanted to put into practice. The idea of approaching the Prison Director with the aim of holding a similar course for prisoners came as a result of putting those thinking skills into practice. Who most needs to be taught how to think? Who has all the time in the world to do so?

With the full backing of the Prison Director and Desmond Zammit Marmara, the education officer, the course took off. When the registration notice went up on the board, lots of people put their names down. Anything, one supposes, is a welcome distraction from the grey monotony of Corradino. Eventually, as the weeks progressed, some of these dropped out. Thinking was, evidently, not for them. But a hard core of keen students have stayed on and Norman is very, very proud of their progress. They have gone from staring vacantly when a problem is put to them, to solving it in the most ingenious of ways – proving, he says, that thinking can indeed be thought. To prove this, he throws a couple of brain teasers at me over the lunch-table. They are beyond me. I begin to think there is something quite wrong with my thought processes; that they are, perhaps, dysfunctional. How could anybody ever solve that sort of thing? "We only use a small part of our brain capacity," replies. "Once you have the right tools, you can get to use some more."

But is it wise to teach convicts, of all people, to think better? Couldn't it be said that they might use their newly –acquired skills for negative purposes? That's an obvious accusation, but Norman prefers to approach the issue positively. "Many of those people are in prison because they lacked thinking skills. Proper thought would have kept them out of jail, given them a more positive and less self-damaging approach to life, a different attitude." So how is the course structured?

The prisoners, apparently, tackle a series of Direct Attention Thinking Tools – DATT™, for short. These range from the ones we take for granted, like judging the consequences of an action before taking that action (the old-fashioned look before you leap), to 'aims, goals, objectives', possible alternatives, priorities, key values and 'other peoples views'. These may seem obvious, but how many times have we ditched them when driven by over-riding passions, everything from anger to jealousy to excitement? Too often, we lose our heads when we could do with some calm thought. Some of the people who lose their heads end up in jail. Thinking, as the de Bono blurb states, is not a natural ability: or rather, the actual thinking is, but the skills to shape thought are not.

The prison students are now so keen that they look forward to their weekly sessions, when they chew over the problems Norman Darmanin Demajo throws at them, and try to come up with the best solution. They have even begun to produce a form of newsletter, which they fill with their own contributions. The idea was to replace the previous prison newsletter, which they thought 9accurately) to be dull and uninteresting.

Professor de Bono is delighted by the Corradino prison programme, and its success. It has gone on the internet website, and he hopes that it will serve as a model for similar courses to be held in prisons elsewhere in the world. As for Norman, his satisfaction is that of putting his own thinking skills into practice and transmitting them to the people who really need them the most. "If they leave prison and use their new way of thinking to start afresh, with a positive lifestyle, then I can consider my efforts to have been a success," he says.

The Time to Think programme at the prisons is in need of some funds to keep the newsletter going, and to pay for the materials used during coursework. Donation are welcome, and may be sent to Time to Think, c/o The Sunday Circle, Network Publications, Vjal ir-Rihan, San Gwann, Malta.

www.time2think.org