September EuroPris Newsletter 2017

Words from the President

Nils Öberg, Director General of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, is the new president of EuroPris:

“The EuroPris presidency is an important undertaking and I want to contribute to the development of humane and rehabilitative prison conditions in Europe. Through EuroPris we want to enable exchange of experience and knowledge between the European countries. EuroPris will also promote humanitarian principles as stated in the European Prison Rules and Council of Europe Standards. I now want to further develop the good work that is already being done and I am convinced that we can make a difference, as speaking partners and facilitators for the exchange of ideas.”

A new look!

We just launched the new EuroPris website. A completely new look and easier to navigate. Visit our website www.europris.org. Click below to see our pages.

EuroPris Interview

Jože Podržaj, Prison Administration of the Republic of Slovenia

EuroPris : What do you consider to be the biggest achievements for your service over the last year? What challenges did you have to overcome?

Jože Podržaj : From the general point of view there is no doubt that the Strategy of Prison System 2017-2020 is a great achievement. It is the first document of that kind in our system. I would like to point out also a program which we implement with the help of European Social Fund: Inmates Development of Working Competencies. The aim of the project is to increase the level of basic knowledge and skills of prisoners with tertiary prevention, the successful integration on labour market after release and effective rehabilitation. An additional plus is an increased number of activities and inmates involved in the program.

EuroPris News

New board elected at the Annual General Meeting

At the 6th EuroPris Conference and Annual General Meeting in Lillestrøm, Norway, new board members were elected. Read more about the new board members here.

Risk and needs assessment in theory and in practice

Want to learn more about risk and needs assessment? Discuss and share new knowledge and practical examples? On the 12-13 of October EuroPris holds a workshop on an issue that is a challenge for most correctional agencies. You will meet experts and researchers and learn about the latest evidence in the field. The workshop will also address specific risk assessments for women, sexual offenders and violent extremist offenders.

For draft programme and registration click here

Mental health – a growing challenge for prison and probation services

SAVE THE DATE. EuroPris and CEP will jointly organise a workshop on Mental health in Prison and Probation on 6-7 December in Dublin. Topics will include increasing number of mental health patients, transitional services, suicide prevention, intellectual disability and personality disorders. For more information and if you are interested to present on your practices, send a mail to [email protected].

More information will follow soon on our website in the events page.

European Prison Regime Forum

Vocational training and Reintegration are the main topics of the workshop taking place 21-24 November in Rome . Prison Services are invited to present and discuss their best practices in this field. Registration is open until 13 November, but the pre-booked hotel rooms are released 4 ^th October. So, if you are interested to join, register and book as soon as possible. Draft agenda and registration links can be found on here .

Other News

European Penitentiary Training Academies

The Annual conference of the EPTA is taking place 20-21 September in Morat/Murten, Switzerland under the Swiss EPTA Presidency.

Topic of the conference will be Leadership Training and Training of Prison Managers. The Training Academies from Finland, Estonia and Moldova will be participating for the first time as observers.

For more information about EPTA and the event please see http://epta.europris.org/.

European Prison Education Association

The 16th biennial International Conference on prison education is taking place in Vienna the 16th to the 19th of November 2017 . More than 150 participants from Europe and beyond will make the conference motto true: “Beyond Frontiers”.

The participants will elaborate a range of different aspects of prison education such as: adult learning, prison education, influential justice policies, international frameworks, ICT in prison, universities and their role and education for foreign national prisoners.

For early bird registration and additional information please check our conference-website conference-website .

EuroPris Expert Groups

Family Relations

The Family relations expert group is proud to present the Good Practice Collection they drafted in cooperation with Children of Prisoners Europe (COPE). The Collection comprises chapters on visiting facilities, community involvement, communication, intervention programmes and staff training. If you are interested download the Collection here.

ICT

In the course of 2017 two topical reports were written by experts of the ICT group. The first report on Payments in Prison presents case studies from Sweden, Croatia, Belgium and Finland. The second report, with contributions from Sweden, Denmark and Ireland, deals with the question: How can ICT make the offender better prepared for release? Both reports can be downloaded from the EuroPris website.

Education in Prison

EuroPris started the Education in Prison expert group in June this year in cooperation with the European Prison Education Association (EPEA). The group will work until mid-2018 on a review of the Council of Europe recommendation Rec. R (89) 12 on education in prison and advise on changes of and additions to the recommendation. The review will be complemented with a best practice collection.

Real Estate and Logistics

A new expert group on Real estate & logistics will start its work with a meeting in September in Ghent. The group will explore academic research on prison design and discuss issues like sustainable design, prison design for normalisation and delivering the introduction of IP solutions for security installations within an operational prison.

Foreign Nationals in Prison & Probation

The expert group is preparing a Special Edition of the EuroPris Newsletter on foreign nationals for October.

Please keep contributing to the Best Practice Manual on Foreign Nationals in Prison and Probation. Download the form here and send it to [email protected].

Project News

ECOPRIS

“ECOPRIS” experience is about engaging and empowering prison staff to transform and enhance prison work.

The project is now coming to an end. Some main results of ECOPRIS were: 1. Prison work comparison framework; 2. Prison work competences self-assessment tool and 3. Prison work training, providing the opportunity to get acquainted not only with the theory and methodology, but also get information about the piloting results and impacts and prospect future endeavour to tackle emerging trends and challenges. These tools enhance prison services capacity building and benchmarking in the field of prison work.

Read about the project and the outputs here .

IDECOM

Innovation, Development and Communication for a Better Education in the Prison System – (IDECOM) - presented the project results on the final conference in July in Timisoara, Romania. Some of the more important outputs of the project are a new multidisciplinary curriculum and training programs and a joint development approach aiming at implementing new learning and teaching methods, such as learner-centered and problem-based teaching and learning.

R2PRIS

The first short-term joint staff training event of The first joint staff training event of Radicalisation Prevention in Prisons Project will be delivered on the 25-29th of September, in Lisbon. The training focuses on how the radicalisation prevention strategies, risk assessment tools and materials developed under the R2PRIS project can be applied.

For more information contact [email protected] or enter www.r2pris.org

FORINER

FORINER Final Conference

The European Foriner project has tested several solutions to offer distance education to foreign national prisoners. In the past months, 15 pilot projects all over Europe have been developed and tested. The purpose of these pilots was to examine how educational courses for foreign national prisoners can be organised, given that it is provided by their home country and received in the country in which they are imprisoned. The research report including all results will be available at the final conference 28 November 2017 in Brussels.

Academy of European Law (ERA)

The radicalisation project series continues with two more seminars scheduled:

Utrecht, 8-9 March 2018: Rehabilitation and alternative sanctions to detention of radicalised individuals.
Trier, June or September 2018: Best practice and the way forward in relation to cross-border judicial cooperation in countering terrorism and preventing radicalisation in detention.

In addition, ERA recently finalised a series of seminars on improving conditions and finding alternatives to detention. The final seminar of five took place at ERA’s conference centre in Trier on 1-2 June 2017, entitled: ‘Improving Detention Conditions at EU Level: Best Practice, Legislation and the Follow-Up to the European Commission’s Green Paper’.

MenACE

First results from MenACE - Mental Health, Aging and Palliative Care in Prisons.

As part of its goals a literature review was made in the fields of mental health, ageism and palliative care, with a clear focus on these realities in the prison systems. Particularly, a questionnaire was developed to collect information in the partner countries. Preliminary results from the literature review show that depression and anxiety disorders are much more prevalent in prison comparing to community samples. Data collected in partner countries show that serious mental health problems affect inmates with high suicide rates when compared with the community settings. The number of older inmates, that is, inmates with more than 50 years, is increasing in all the surveyed countries.