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The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between the quality of prison life and mental health among prisoners and the occurrence of violence.

In total, 203 prisoners from Dubrava Correctional Center in Kosovo participated. Data on background characteristics of the prisoners, quality of prison life, mental health symptoms and exposure to physical, psychological and sexual violence were collected through interviewer-administered questionnaires. Data were analyzed using general linear models (GLM) and manual backwards model search with step-wise exclusion.

The GLM analysis showed a significant negative association between anxiety symptom load (−1.4), physical violence (−1.5) and psychological violence (−1.9), and quality of prison life. Furthermore, it appeared that prisoners rating of quality of life (QoL) increased with time among prisoners not exposed to violence, while this was not seen among prisoners exposed to violence. Finally, there was an inverse association between the dimensions of respect, fairness, humanity and good staff/prisoner relations, and the proportion of prisoners exposed to violence.

An environment with higher levels of respect, fairness, humanity and good relations between staff and prisoners was associated with lower levels of violence. Hence, a prison that focuses on promoting QoL and good mental health among prisoners will show lower levels of violence, thereby making the prison a more tolerable place for the prisoners and a better working environment for prison staff.

This chapter will examine the basis for the teaching of integrity-based competencies to prison officers as part of their training. This training underpins the performance of prison officers in the execution of their daily workplace duties, and forms a part of the ‘Sustainable Justice’ approach to rehabilitation. At the heart of this approach is a desire to understand and explain how a prison officer can be taught to go beyond what is the basic requirement in their tasks, in order to deliver the ‘safe, secure and humane’ service required of them in the Irish Prison Service (IPS) Mission Statement. The degree of success in achieving this form of elevated integrity within the prison can be seen to impact upon the lives of the prisoners in the officer’s care, and on wider society as a whole.

This chapter will also discuss mentoring as a key form of learning within the prisons. While the world of the prison is one which is closed to many in society, the author gained insights when he worked as an ‘embedded sociologist’, working as the senior academic on the IPS recruit training programme for five years between 2008 and 2013 within Ireland’s prison system. Here, he used his academic experience to put together an award-winning academic programme with his colleagues and senior IPS training staff. This experience provided him with valuable sociological understandings into the hidden world of the Irish prison system, as well as the officers who work behind their walls.

The general theme for this conference is ‘prisons and public health’. Therefore, let me begin with an obvious, but often ignored point, by saying: the best tool for improved prison health is to reduce the prison population. Such a measure would also reduce crime, but I ignore that point here, and concentrate on health. Punishment is intended delivery of pain. Prisons represent a major instrument for the delivery of that pain. Those working in the prisons do much to alleviate pain, as beautifully illustrated by Alison Liebling (2004) in her book Prisons and their moral performance. In individual cases, prisoners might also profit from spending some time in prison.2 None the less, prisons are close relatives to capital punishment. Not the whole life, but parts, of a person’s life is taken. I have never been able to forget an elderly man I once met in the major prison in Oslo. ‘Spring is the worst’, he said. ‘Not because of the explosions in green pleasures outside, but because it was in spring that I was imprisoned. Each new spring is a reminder that one more year is lost. There are not so many left.’

There has been growing attention given to the concept of social climate as an element of prison practice. Research has indicated that more positive social climates can improve safety, psychological well-being, quality of life and contribute towards reduced reoffending. The purpose of this paper is to consider how the more positive social climates found in democratic therapeutic communities are constructed and how these practices can be replicated in other settings.

This paper adopts a reflective practice approach. The intention is to look back at the concept of social climate in prisons and in particular within a prison-based democratic therapeutic community (DTC); draw upon research and theory in order to critically evaluate the nature and effectiveness of that social climate, and; draw wider lessons about the nurturing and maintenance of social climates that may have broader relevance in prisons.

It is concluded that understanding and managing social climate is an essential aspect of improving the safety and effectiveness of prisons. Developing practices that enhance social climate requires looking beyond mainstream prison practices, towards niches such as specialist units and prisons, including DTCs and other therapeutic communities, and psychologically informed environments, as well as looking at practices in other settings including forensic mental health. Taking this wider perspective can be source of ideas and practice that could inform a profound culture change.

The paper offers an attempt to understand the distinct practices that create a more positive social climate in DTCs and consider how elements of this could be exported to other prisons. This has implications for both penal theory and practice.

The chapter considers the change of position of the Home Office on the value of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in England and Wales which took place around 2003 after the end of the Crime Reduction Programme (CRP). Before the CRP Home Office researchers had shown little interest in RCTs; after it, they came close to arguing that no other kinds of evaluation research were worth doing. This represented a reversal of a position that had dominated Home Office thinking on the issue for almost 30 years – that RCTs were in general impractical and unlikely to produce clear-cut results. This view was based in part on the experience of RCTs in the 1970s, which led influential researchers to conclude that the method could not be transferred from medicine to criminal justice. But, disappointed with the lack of definite results from the CRP, the Home Office turned back to RCTs as a potential source of certainty about what works. The chapter considers two recent scholarly exchanges on the question, in relation to an evaluation of a community crime reduction programme, for which an experimental design was attempted but not achieved, and to Lawrence Sherman's recent advocacy of RCTs and his use of research on restorative justice as an example of the successful use of the method. The chapter argues that the restorative justice research, while of very high quality, does not provide as clear an example of the use of an RCT as Sherman claims, and concludes with some reflections on the inherent difficulties of criminal justice evaluation, and on the lack of a predictable, rational relationship between research quality and policy influence.