Relationships in the context of suicide risk

Abstract

The relationships between offenders under probation supervision and their managers are never more important than when trying to understand and assess the risk of suicide. While there has been extensive research on suicide risk in prisons in the UK and elsewhere, resulting in the introduction of suicide prevention strategies for staff managing vulnerable prisoners, and a marked decrease in self-inflicted deaths of prisoners during the last decade, there has been very little research on suicide and self-harm relevant to offenders in community settings (see Mackenzie et al., 2013). A collaboration between the London Probation Trust and the University of Westminster attempted to fill this gap, focusing on three areas of research, described briefly below. The findings of the first study from this collaboration were published in Legal and Criminological Psychology in December 2013 (Cook and Borrill, 2013). This study focused on the factors that probation staff take into account when addressing the difficult task of rating suicide risk. The risk ratings of 38,910 offenders within the LPT area were … Language: en