Editorial

Citation

MacDonald, M. and Kane, R.G.a.D. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Prisoner Health, Vol. 9 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPH-07-2013-0034

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Prisoner Health, Volume 9, Issue 4.

Welcome to the final issue of 2013. The editorial team have been particularly pleased with the quality of papers published this year, especially those from countries that are not often featured in the prisoner health literature. We are looking forward to continuing in the same vein in 2014 and, as always, would encourage you to recommend the journal to colleagues and encourage then to submit papers for consideration.

In this issue, the geographical spread is continued as we feature contributions from Nepal, Portugal and the USA. In our first paper, Jennifer E. Johnson, Yael Chatav Schonbrun, Jessica E. Nargiso, Caroline C. Kuo, Ruth T. Shefner, Collette A. Williams, and Caron Zlotnick, explore treatment needs and factors contributing to engagement in substance use and sobriety among women with co-occurring substance use and major depressive disorders as they return to the community from prison in the USA. Using data gathered from semi-structured interviews supplemented with a survey, the authors note that relationship, emotion, and mental health factors influenced women's first post-prison substance use. Further, women attributed episodes of recovery to sober and social support, treatment and building on recovery work done in prison. The participants also described a need for comprehensive pre-release planning and post-release treatment that would address mental health, family, and housing/employment, and more actively assist them in overcoming barriers to care. This last finding strikes a chord with conclusions drawn from recent work on throughcare in Europe and is obviously an area that merits further investigation.

In our second paper, Liliana Alexandra Monteiro Guerra and Paula Maria Façanha da Cruz Fresco present findings from a study that aimed to collect reliable information about pharmacy services in Portuguese prisons and develop a set of suggestions to develop these services with a view to improving the health services provided to the prisoner population. Data were collected from a survey delivered to all Portuguese prisons with a holding capacity greater than 50 prisoners. The authors report that survey responses revealed that only a small percentage of prisons have pharmacists while in over 60 per cent of prisons, guards participate in pharmacy activities. Furthermore, responses indicated that over 90 per cent of prisons do not have adequate storage conditions for drugs. The authors conclude that their study highlights the gap between public and prison pharmacy services, and characterizes most prison pharmacies in Portugal as locales of storage and distribution of drugs, with no effective drug management or policy advocating the promotion of rational drug use.

José N. Caraballo, Coralee Pérez-Pedrogo, and Carmen E. Albizu-García present the results of a study that examined the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptomatology in a Latino prison population in Puerto Rico, measured with the Spanish version of the Davidson Trauma Scale (DTS), a 17-item self-report screening measure that is extensively used to examine the presence, frequency, and severity of all core symptoms corresponding to PTSD. The authors report that results obtained indicate that the Spanish version of the DTS has a high internal consistency. The results obtained also support the authors’ initial hypotheses and are consistent with those reported in the literature. The authors note that the study was designed to explore if PTSD symptoms are currently prevalent among inmates and to raise awareness of the need to improve our understanding of the disorder and develop appropriate interventions to address it in correctional settings. They conclude that further research is needed to advance understanding of disorder prevalence, as well as associated information on course, phenomenology, protective factors, and treatment.

Our issue concludes with a paper by Chandra Kant Jha and Dennis M. Donovan, which explores activities leading to the arrest of drug users in Nepal, how such offenders cope without taking drugs in custody and prison and plan abstinence after release. The author reports that study participants engaged in various categories of criminal activity, including stealing, looting, etc., to support their drug use, noting that most drug users had experienced custody and prison at least once. Furthermore, drug use relapses often led participants to re-engage in criminal activities including drug dealing. The author also discusses the roles of parents in Nepalese society, who are often overburdened by their sons and daughter's drug use and concerned about repeated relapses. This can result in negotiations with their children to keep them imprisoned to facilitate resistance to drug taking and to curtail their involvement in crimes and conflicts resulting from drug use. The authors conclude that keeping substance abusers in prison does not appear to be an effective strategy, as many participants relapse after release. A prison-based educational and health promotion strategy is recommended to enable drug users to develop knowledge, skills, and coping strategies to facilitate abstinence. However, the author reports that to date, no efforts have been made to provide such services.

Morag MacDonald, Robert Greifinger and David Kane