The keynote speaker to the conference, held in Wellington last November, John is a forensic psychiatrist working in a medium secure unit and remand prison in Hampshire.
John played a central role in the development of the concept of Equivalence for Prison Psychiatry in which each prisoner gets his or her own doctor and can expect to have access to the same health services as are available in the community.
In New Zealand prisoners with secondary or tertiary level mental health needs are referred to the regional forensic mental health service, funded by District Health Boards.
If the prisoner’s needs can be managed at a primary health service level the prisoner will be managed within the prison system.
Corrections’ Psychological Service provides specialist psychological treatment (focused on issues related to offending), both in the community and in prison.
John says the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) programme is one of the outcomes from United Kingdom (UK) prison health reform.
“It is a ground-breaking, crossdepartmental pilot treatment initiative aimed at dangerous offenders whose offending is linked to severe personality disorder,” he says.
John also spoke about the establishment of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) which are a statutory set of arrangements operated by criminal justice and social care agencies that aim to reduce the serious re-offending behaviour of sex and violent offenders.
“This is a complex programme and major experiment and I don’t know of anything comparable in the world,” he says.
Corrections Senior Research Adviser Dr Nick Wilson says a year long pilot by the Psychological Service of a multi-year intensive treatment programme for imprisoned violent offenders with severe personality disorders begins in November.
“All jurisdictions face similar treatment difficulties relating to offenders with personality disorders,” he says.
Two Australians attended the conference, Senior Psychological Clinician Steve Wright and Senior Aboriginal Programmes Officer Kevin Wilson, both from the Rehabilitation Programmes Branch of the Department for Correctional Services in South Australia.
The South Australian government has provided funding to implement rehabilitative programmes for sex offenders, violent offenders and indigenous offenders and Steve and Kevin took the opportunity while in New Zealand to explore equivalent New Zealand models.
They have already implemented sex offender programmes after doing a literature review of best practice in international jurisdictions such as Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Following this review the Australian researchers found that New Zealand programmes were setting the benchmark in rehabilitative programmes particularly incorporating the cultural element.
“The fact that evaluation studies support the effectiveness of the programmes, and that they are running so well, helped our decision to explore New Zealand programmes further,” says Steve.
Their visit included community residential centre Montgomery House, Te Piriti special treatment unit for child sex offenders, and the violence prevention unit at Rimutaka Prison.
“What we liked about them is that the programmes here have a holistic focus, they look at developing the broader view of the person,” Steve says.
Kevin noticed a huge difference here with language and customs being incorporated into daily sentence management.
“In Australia many aboriginal groups have lost a lot of their language and cultural identity, so I was amazed to see the culture here so alive and well,” says Kevin.
“I like how the spirituality and wellbeing of the person and connection to the land is important,” he adds. Kevin thought South Australia prisons could instigate “smoking ceremonies” similar to powhiri.
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