Offender Mental Health Research Articles

Improving Collaborative Practice to Address Offender Mental Health: Criminal Justice and Mental Health Service Professionals' Attitudes Toward Interagency Training, Current Training Needs, and Constraints

Background: Professionals from the mental health and criminal justice systems must collaborate effectively to address offender mental health, but interprofessional training is lacking. Pedagogical frameworks are required to support the development of training in this new area. To inform this framework, this article explores the readiness of professionals toward interprofessional training and demographic differences in these. It explores expectations of interprofessional training, perceived obstacles to collaborative working, interprofessional training needs, and challenges facing delivery.Methods and Findings: A concurrent mixed methods approach collected data from professionals attending a crossing boundaries interprofessional workshop. Data were collected through a combination of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) questionnaire (N = 52), free text questions (N = 52), and focus groups (N = 6). Mental health and criminal justice professionals' attitude toward interprofessional learning were positive (M = 17.81; N = 43). They did not see their own service as insular (M= 4.02; N = 44) and reported strong person centredness (M = 6.07; N = 43). These findings suggest professionals are open to the introduction and implementation of future interprofessional training. There were no significant demographic differences in these attitudes.Conclusions: Professionals raised a range of generic curriculum and educator mechanisms in the development of future interprofessional training, suggesting the transfer of pedagogical frameworks from established interprofessional programs into this new arena is feasible. Context-specific factors, such as offender national policy agendas and the challenges of user involvement for mentally ill offenders, must be taken into account. Greater clarity on multi- versus interprofessional training is still required with this group of professionals.

The Norwegian Offender Mental Health and Addiction Study - Design and Implementation of a National Survey and Prospective Cohort Study.

The Norwegian prison inmates are burdened by problems before they enter prison. Few studies have managed to assess this burden and relate it to what occurs for the inmates once they leave the prison. The Norwegian Offender Mental Health and Addiction (NorMA) study is a large-scale longitudinal cohort study that combines national survey and registry data in order to understand mental health, substance use, and criminal activity before, during, and after custody among prisoners in Norway. The main goal of the study is to describe the criminal and health-related trajectories based on both survey and registry linkage information. Data were collected from 1,499 inmates in Norwegian prison facilities during 2013–2014. Of these, 741 inmates provided a valid personal identification number and constitute a cohort that will be examined retrospectively and prospectively, along with data from nationwide Norwegian registries. This study describes the design, procedures, and implementation of the ongoing NorMA study and provides an outline of the initial data.

Integration and offender mental health

Integrated care can introduce seamless coordinated pathways that are focused around the individual needs of patients, helping to prevent missed opportunities for intervention. Within offender healthcare, sequential funnelling through designated areas where screening can take place, along with co-location of services, lends itself to integrated working, at least in theory. However, within the offender healthcare pathway, service fragmentation and autonomous, disconnected (often referred to as siloed) working, has historically been the norm. If commissioned and designed to ensure and incentivise connections between services, whilst developing high quality service-focused research activities, pathways could enable clinical and social interventions, and outcomes, on a public health scale for these highly morbid populations. As such, offender healthcare offers a real opportunity to model integration for wider introduction across other health and social care areas. Discussed within is the call for integration, its concept, and its role within offender healthcare.

A Factor Mixture Model Approach to Elaborating on Offender Mental Health Classification With the MMPI–2–RF

A large proportion of prison inmates suffer from mental illnesses or severe personality disorders; therefore, offender classification is a worthwhile endeavor both for efficiently allocating mental health treatment resources and security risk classification. This study sought to elaborate on offender classification by using an advanced statistical technique, factor mixture modeling, which capitalizes on the strengths of both latent trait analysis and latent class analysis. A sample consisting of 616 male and 194 female prison inmates was used for this purpose. The MMPI–2–RF Restructured Clinical (RC) scales were used to elaborate on a variety of latent trait, latent class, and factor mixture models. A 3-factor, 5-class mixture model was deemed optimal in this sample. Remaining MMPI–2–RF scales as well as scores on external criterion measures relevant to externalizing psychopathology were used to further elaborate on the utility of the resulting latent classes. These analyses indicated that 3 of the 5 classes were predominantly different expressions of externalizing personality proclivities, whereas the remaining 2 indicated inmates with substantial internalizing or thought-disordered characteristics. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Prior Agency Contact and Physical Abuse in Cases of Child Homicide

This article describes the features of child homicide offenders' previous contact with professional agencies and the incidence of prior physical violence towards their victims. This is based on an examination of 48 cases notified to the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1984 in which children had been killed by parents or parent-substitutes in England and Wales. Professional agencies had been involved with two-thirds of the offenders. Women's contacts were usually with medical agencies, and men's with social agencies. Of those cases with prior agency contact, whilst almost two-thirds involved a history of violence towards the child, in only a third of the cases had the reason for agency contact explicitly included concern about physical abuse. In fact, the most frequent reason for agency contact was concern about the offender's mental health. Agencies had taken action in two-thirds of the cases seen by them; this tended to be psychiatric treatment for women and child protection measures for men. A quarter of the offenders seen by professionals had been hostile to this intervention. The above findings run counter to the popular stereotype (fostered by the child death inquiries) that child-killers will have had extensive contact with social agencies and explicitly concerning physical abuse. Professionals need to be aware of more ‘subtle’ warning signals in identifying potentially filicidal parents.