Mindfulness builds resilience in prison communities, through free training to develop a mindful culture on mental health to reduce crime
A Mindfulness in Prisons Project (MiPP) has been developed from literature review on the efficacy of mindfulness-based intervention in prison settings. We have consulted with the mental health teams covering the prisons in this area over the past 12 months, and are currently training volunteer staff teams in the prisons. The idea is to support prisoners through the project, and to create a culture of a mindful approach to mental health care throughout the prison community. Data from the Cambridgeshire prison groups will be used to ascertain the outcomes the MiPP has for participants, and how effectively we have supported the engagement of the prison community surrounding the group. We will be measuring using the depression, anxiety and stress severity scale (DASs), and working with the mental health support services and extant therapy services in the prisons to ensure their needs are met. We would like to use this funding to develop the change that is necessary in the healthcare systems we provide, especially for communities and groups in difficult or vulnerable circumstances. Health care conventionally doesn't account for rates of mental health sufferers, and this is the challenge for our generation - to support development of how we approach our own health, and how we create services that are effective, available and cost-economical to support people to do this more effectively. The World Health Organisation have indicated that anxiety, stress and depression are the main causes of disability, and work-place absenteeism worldwide. The director-general of World Health Organisation has mirrored our literature-review findings saying “We know that treatment of depression and anxiety makes good sense for health and wellbeing;" and "that it makes sound economic sense too. We must now find ways to make sure that access to mental health services becomes a reality for all men, women and children, wherever they live.” MiPP will take small groups of prisoners and staff through a 10-week mindfulness practice course, designed around accredited good practice guidelines from successful mindfulness-based interventions studied previously. It's been shown such intervention improves self-regulation, reduces anxiety, depression and stress and reduces psychological precursors to criminal behaviour. We intend this project to develop a more mindful community in UK prisons, bringing people together in a challenging environment to create personal, practical strategies for engaging with better mental health practices. Through MiPP we're building strong relationships of support between inmates and support staff, by including the staff in training groups so they can continue to build upon the principles MiPP will help introduce. This combined approach is setting the stage for an improved prison community, guiding people to realise and utilise their sentences as a potential for personal development. In-turn we envisage an overall reduction in re-offending rates and costs once significant proportions of the prison populations have gone through the MiPP. Once people have a greater competency to assess and intervene in their own frames of mind and challenging emotional states, the significant effectors of poor mental health in prison life and work are diminished. This funding will enable us to work with the staff and residents of these prisons for 12 months. It will provide further training and free courses for willing staff at each site to act as key links for prisoner mental health and mindfulness support, it will cover training, mileage and costs of 1 full-time and 1 trainee project facilitator, and will help us develop an online portal the prisons can use to access ongoing support, training, information and resources. After this period we will be feeding back the results to the governors and Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service, on the numbers of residents and staff supported during the project; and the health and offending outcomes seen
This project closed unsuccessfully on 27th November 2018