Lorna A. Rhodes is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, where she taught medical and institutional anthropology.  She is the author of Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (University of California Press 1991) and Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press 2004).  She has published several articles about HMP Grendon, where she spent a month conducting research in 2008. Every working day she went to B wing therapeutic community, attending community meetings and talking with staff and residents. This conversation looks at this experience and compares it with research done at a high secure unit in a prison in Washington State.