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This paper aims to explore qualitative semi‐structured interviews – conducted with NHS mental healthcare patients/prisoners located in one HM Prison Service (HMPS) establishment. The methodological reflections, whilst not directly related to the content of the interviews, seek to offer a debate about interview data in relation to the processes of their creation.

The dialogue is designed primarily for those who conduct, or have an interest in, mental health‐orientated research, particularly those who undertake studies in secure settings with mental health service users as participants.

Regarding interview method as a tool for data collection/creation, methodological foci for discussion include the structure of interview questions, participant unfamiliarity with the process, body language and non‐verbal communication, plus discussions concerning conversational turn‐taking and interviewee agency.

This article stems from a small‐scale empirical fieldwork study in one prison setting and offers a debate about interview data in secure settings with mental health service users.

This paper focuses on the mental health of adult male prisoners and the mental health care provided within Her Majesty's Prison Service (HMPS), United Kingdom (UK). Currently, the level of mental health need within this population is high, and prison mental health services require additional positive developments. The prison milieu is not always conducive to good mental health, and is not often a useful catalyst for mental health care. Arguably, prison mental health services ought to be increasingly fashioned (commissioned, provided, managed and practised) in direct accordance with the prison social environment, institutional set‐up and specific mental health requirements of prisoners/patients. In this paper, therefore, attention is devoted to social and institutional structures which permeate the prison setting. The proposition is that situation‐specific and culturally responsive mental health care is a must; context is crucial.

This chapter delves into the experiences and social worlds of women previously sentenced to capital punishment and now imprisoned in the Philippines. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, the pathways of 27 women previously on death row are presented. Narratives reveal multiple constraints stemming from gendered familial, relational, and economic responsibilities, vulnerability to gendered control and violence, poverty or financial precarity. These gendered inequities were compounded by structural barriers in the context of a low-income, postcolonial nation with entrenched corruption. The women’s stories reveal four pathways to criminalization: (1) responding to violence; (2) economic precarity; (3) drug abuse; and (4) guilt by association and corrupted justice. The research reported in this chapter enriches feminist criminological knowledge on gendered pathways to criminalization by adding the voices of women in the Philippines to a now growing body of Southeast Asian scholarship. In line with previous studies, findings reveal the ways in which women come into conflict with the law because of choices made within constrained social circumstances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how staff attend to their well-being when working in an inpatient mental health setting with older adults with dementia and complex mental health needs; how staff understand the link between their well-being and the well-being of patients.

A semi-structured group interview was held with 11 members of two multidisciplinary teams. The discussion was audio-recorded and analysed using thematic analysis.

Staff reported managing their well-being by both connecting with and avoiding the difficult emotions of the work. The team avoided the gravity of the work through humour, a task-focus, an absence of thinking and the displacement of workplace frustrations onto an outgroup. Connecting with emotions was done in tolerable ways: in contained reflective spaces, in the presence of supportive others, through genuine connections with patients as people and when the organisation demonstrated care for the staff.

Avoidant strategies appeared to represent short-term ways of maintaining staff well-being, while connecting with the gravity of the work appeared to represent what we hope is a more sustainable approach to managing well-being. A crucial premise for staff well-being is teams embedded within organisations that care for their employees.

Poor staff well-being can have serious consequences for an organisation, particularly in the existentially challenging environment of dementia care. This study offers a unique opportunity to explore staff well-being in a UK inpatient mental health setting with older adults with dementia and complex mental health needs.

This chapter examines the potential of ‘Artivism’ for activist criminology. Drawing on a body of work developed since 2016, this chapter explores a series of projects that have examined how an approach to research that harnesses the activist qualities of art could be used to inform transformative criminological research. Artivism is an approach that involves merging ‘the boundless imagination of art and the radical engagement of politics’ (Jordan, 2020, p. 60), and by amplifying marginalised voices, the overarching aim is to effect social and political change. This type of activist art is not reducible to the production of political art – art about an issue – but instead seeks to change the way that we think, speak, and act. In this sense, this approach accords with the principles of critical social research in ensuring that ‘the voices and experiences of those marginalised by institutionalised state practices are heard and represented’ (Scraton, 2007, p. 10). Examining pilot projects developed with artists and producers based in Liverpool, England, and focussed on experiences of prison and probation, the authors examine the potential that this approach has to change both the way they work as critical criminologists and the objects of this study. With reference to the question of a method for activist criminology, the chapter suggests that critical criminological work can be informed and enhanced by collaboration with socially engaged art – a form of artistic practice that seeks to address social and political issues and is often associated with activist strategies. This chapter, therefore, aims to contribute to debates about how activist criminologies may be done and offers suggestions for new directions in this work underpinned by interdisciplinary collaborations and the coproduction of research with those similarly committed to a transformative project.