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Peer and professional support are important for women in prison to help them tackle a range of issues including self-harm. To date, research has not explored in any depth how women experience peer support provided in prison to help them manage their self-harm including peer support provided through the Listeners Scheme. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This was a case study in one women’s prison employing mixed, qualitative methods. These included a questionnaire distributed to women and staff, a focus group with prison listeners, semi-structured interviews with women who self-harmed and semi-structured interviews with prison staff, together with a series of observations in the prison site.

While women in prison welcomed both professional and peer support their support preferences were influenced by how serious women considered their self-harm to be and the degree to which they regarded their relationships with staff as trusting and/or supportive. The therapeutic community (TC) that operated in the prison facilitated different relationships between women who self-harmed in prison and staff, than have hitherto been reported in the research literature. These relationships described by women and staff as “more open” allowed women to seek staff support when managing their self-harm behaviours. Women sought peer support from listeners in addition to staff support particularly at times when staff were unavailable for example at evenings and weekends.

The case study design was conducted in one women’s prison which operated a TC. The principles of the TC that operated in the prison are supported by the wider literature on TCs as conducive to good mental health. Findings are thus relevant for establishments with TCs .

Women opted for support from staff for helping them to manage their severe self-harm, over and above the peer support available through the prison Listener Scheme. This finding contrasts with previous research that suggests women trying to manage their self-harm in prison prioritise support from their peers because staff are often found to harbour unhelpful attitudes to women’s self-harm that makes seeking support difficult.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the current evidence for peer support in prisons, in particular its contribution to working with prisoners who self-injure and the extent to which the success of peer support schemes such as the prison listeners, hinges upon staff’s willingness to engage with the initiative.

The review was constructed by using primary and secondary terms to search the literature. The studies focused on peer support in custody with reference to mental health and self-injury. Searches identified papers on the prison listener scheme and staff perspectives on prison peer support, as these formed a central focus of the review. Studies were excluded from the review if the participants’ behaviours was explicitly linked to suicidal intent, as the review focused on self-injury as a coping strategy.

A total of 23 studies were selected according to specific inclusion criteria (six were grey literature, 17 academic literature). Of the 23 studies ten studies focused on peer support and self-injury. Of the 23 studies the listener scheme was the focus of 15 studies, of these 15 studies self-injury and the listener scheme was a focus of eight studies.

Evidence from the review suggests that prison peer support could be considered on a continuum depending on the different degrees of peer involvement.

A 37% rise in suicides among prisoners in 2007 focused attention on the needs of vulnerable prisoners (Ministry of Justice, 2008). Suicide is a common cause of death in prisons partly because there are a large number of very vulnerable individuals in these settings, and also because of a lack of appropriate resources to support them, for example therapeutic interventions such as counselling (Appleby, 2006). A range of suicide prevention strategies has been developed in prisons, one of which is the Listener Scheme, in which volunteer prisoners are trained to provide confidential support to fellow prisoners who are distressed or vulnerable. There is, however, a significant gap in our knowledge of Listeners' own experiences and the impact on them as individuals. Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used in this study to explore the process, and the findings indicate that Listeners experience significant personal growth alongside changing attitudes to self and others.

In the quest to maximize treatment gains, recent research has shifted focus from treatment itself to the context in which treatment takes place. Such investigations have alluded to rehabilitative climate, therapeutic alliance, prison social climate, and the efficacy of group process. The purpose of this paper is to review peer-support as a mechanism via which these goals might be reached.

A review of the literature on peer-support in carceral settings was undertaken in February 2017.

While there is very little research exploring peer-support in the context of offender rehabilitation, there are some promising signs from many qualitative investigations that peer-led roles can bridge many gaps in support within the therapeutic context.

More research on the potential negative impact of peer-support in carceral setting is needed.

This paper proposes that the implementation of peer-support programs that operate alongside treatment interventions represent an encouraging direction for the future. It is argued that prisoner-led peer-support initiatives that are characterized by shared problem solving and reciprocal emotional support can greatly reduce the anxiety prisoners face surrounding treatment. It is suggested that, through peer-support, treatment gains may be enhanced and better assimilated into program-completers’ lives.

Peer-support may assist current treatment approaches with sexual offenders and could therefore potentially contribute to reductions in recidivism.

This paper is the first to review peer-support in the context of imprisonment and offender therapy. It therefore provides an important status update for future researchers wishing to investigate this topic, and outlines several priorities that such research might interrogate further.

Formalised support services for prisoners that rely on peer methods of delivery show promising health and social outcomes but there is also conjecture that negative effects, both at an individual and organisational level, can occur. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Individuals with recognised professional expertise from various sectors (including ex-prisoners) were invited to contribute to an expert symposium to share their perceptions of the positive and negative effects of peer interventions in prison. Discussions and debate were audio recorded with the consent of all delegates and verbatim transcripts were analysed using framework analysis.

According to the participants, peer interventions in the prison setting created both positive and negative impacts. It was clear from the evidence gathered that peer interventions in prisons can impact positively on health outcomes, but these effects were perceived to be more well-defined for peer deliverers. The notion that peer deliverers can be subjected to “burnout” suggests that supervisory processes for peer workers need to be considered carefully in order to avoid the intervention from being counter-productive. Organisationally, one of the salient issues was the adverse effects that peer interventions cause to the security of the prison.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time an expert symposium has been conducted to specifically examine peer interventions in prison and to consider the effects, both positive and negative, of such schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of prison staff working with imprisoned women who self-harm in English prisons. In this small-scale study, 14 prison staff in three English prisons were interviewed to examine the strategies currently used by them to support imprisoned women who self-harm.

Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was used to identify three key themes: “developing a relationship”, “self-help strategies” and “relational interventions”.

Many staff expressed some dissatisfaction in the techniques available to support the women, and felt their utility can be restricted by the prison regime.

This study suggests that there is currently a deficit in the provision of training and support for prison staff, who are expected to fulfil a dual role as both custodian and carer of imprisoned women. Further research into prison staff’s perception of the training currently available could highlight gaps between current theory and practice in the management of self-harm and thus indicate content for future training programmes. Research exploring the impact of working with imprisoned women who self-harm is suggested to identify strategies for supporting staff. It must be acknowledged that this is a small-scale qualitative study and the findings are from only three prisons and may not apply to staff in other settings.

Currently few studies have focussed on the perspective of prison staff. This study is one of very few studies which focusses on the techniques and resources available to support the women, from the perspective of the prison staff.

Without exception, research on the contribution of the Prison Listener Scheme as a form of peer support for those who self-harm in custody has focussed on men in prison. Women’s experience of custody is shaped by their experiences of hegemonic masculinity that also mediate through women’s roles as mothers and caregivers. Women’s self-harm is similarly influenced by these gendered experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Listener Scheme as a form of peer-to-peer support for women contributes to women managing their self-harm in a female prison.

The paper used a case study design with a mixed-methods approach using a quantitative questionnaire with prison staff (n = 65) and women in custody who had self-harmed (n = 30). Qualitative methods included a focus group with Prison Listeners (n10) and semi-structured interviews with women who self-harm (n10) and prison staff (n10). Four days were also spent observing the prison environment.

Findings suggest that women seek support from other women as peer Listeners for three main reasons; their previous difficult experiences with men, a displacement of the mother role and their attachment needs in custody. Research suggests that women often have significant addictions and mental health concerns and are more likely than their male counterparts to engage in self-harm (Prison Reform Trust, 2017). In addition, women’s self-harm acts as a coping method for “intrapersonal issues” which documents self-harm as a result of frustration and lack of control in custody as opposed to “interpersonal issues” which documents self-harm as a result of relationship difficulties with partners (Walker et al., 2017). This paper suggests that peer support schemes internationally should be tailored to providing support for these types of gendered experience to support women who self-harm in custody. This has implications for the training and support of Listeners in women’s prisons.

This exploratory research was conducted in one female prison and while can be considered to test proof of concept is limited in its generalisability.

This paper suggests that Listeners providing peer-to-peer support for women in custody who self-harm may encounter triggers for this behaviour based on women’s experiences including; how women relate to men; women’s experience of the way custody displaces their role as mothers and women’s need for safe attachments in custody. These gendered experiences have implications for the training and development of peer support schemes in women’s prisons, such as the Listener scheme. Further research is needed to compare the gendered types of support Prison Listeners provide depending on whether they are in male or female prisons.

Some psychodynamic approaches conceptualise female violence as a communication of experiences too difficult to think about. As practitioners, understanding what may be too painful to be thought about is incredibly important in assessment and treatment of forensic populations. Incorporating psychodynamic concepts such as splitting, transference, projection and counter-transference into formulation can be extremely helpful in understanding and formulating women’s risk of violence. The purpose of this paper is to introduce how psychodynamic concepts can be incorporated into understanding, assessment, formulation and treatment with this complex client group. This paper will also outline treatment approaches with this population.

This paper will review existing psychodynamic literature and apply this knowledge to working with violent female offenders. Translating theory into reflective practice will be presented.

This paper presents the value of incorporating psychodynamic considerations into existing strategies of understanding and working with violent female offenders. Ways forwards and research directions are proposed.

This paper is focussed primarily on psychodynamic approaches to understanding this population

Psychodynamic concepts can add an additional dimension to formulation, supervision and treatment approaches with this population. Examining the meaning of violence perpetrated by women as well as enactments can improve practitioner’s depth of understanding. Empirical research examining the benefits of psychoanalytic supervision would be extremely useful to explore the impact on formulation, treatment approaches, treatment effectiveness, staff well-being and staff retention.

There is a lack of literature considering the application of psychodynamic constructs to help formulation of complex female offenders in the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway for women.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives of prisoners and prison staff in relation to mental wellbeing and the negotiation of barriers to accessing and providing support. This small-scale study includes the experiences of 11 prison staff and 9 prisoners within a Category D male prison.

A focus group was conducted with the prisoners and interviews with prison staff. Thematic analysis identified three core themes: “context enabling factors”, “barriers to accessing support for mental wellbeing” and “peer support roles”.

Prisoners conveyed a reluctance in reporting mental health issues due to the fear of being transferred to closed conditions. All staff indicated the benefits of peer support roles.

Further research is required on a wider scale, as it is acknowledged that the findings of this study are from one prison and may not apply to other settings. Although there are barriers that may impact the reporting of mental wellbeing issues, there may be small relational steps that can be taken to address these.

Few studies exist that explore the nuances and barriers within open prisons, perhaps due to the overwhelming need within closed conditions. A context-specific approach considering early prevention strategies to support a safer prison system and successful rehabilitation is explored. The combination of prisoner and staff experiences is of value to both academia and policymakers.