Coping with the COVID Crisis in Prison

Across the globe, prisons have emerged as epicentres of some of the largest outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, as of 4 December, there have been 232,382 COVID-19 cases and 1,565 COVID-related deaths among people incarcerated in the United States (Marshall Project, 2020). The rate of contagion in England and Wales has been lower with 1,529 cases (and 55 deaths) as of the end of October (Ministry of Justice, 13 November 2020). However, to help prevent the spread of the virus, prisoners in England and Wales have been subjected to conditions of severe lockdown, often confined to their cells for 23 hours per day, with face-to-face visits, therapy and education effectively suspended. As international research suggests that solitary confinement for periods of more than two weeks can cause lasting psychological damage (Haney, 2018), the impact of this system-wide period of extreme confinement on the well-being and mental health of prisoners is an urgent issue. Even before the onset of the COVID crisis, prisons in England and Wales have been places of high levels of social and psychological stress and trauma, with recorded rates of self-harm reaching a record high of 63,328 incidents per year in 2019. The COVID pandemic has made the situation even more problematic, however, as restrictions on access to prisons has meant that external researchers have been unable to provide an independent assessment of current conditions and experiences inside beyond official reports from prison management. In a recent Lancet commentary, Hewson and colleagues (2020, July) write: "To date, little focus has been given to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of prisoners; an area of concern given their high rates of pre-existing mental disorders, suicide, and self-harm, and the links between poor mental health, suicide, and self-harm, and reoffending behaviour" (568).

The proposed collaboration between Queen's University Belfast and the User Voice charity will utilise a participatory research design led by prisoner and former prisoner peer researchers in every phase of the research process from design through to dissemination. The User Voice Charity currently operates democratically-elected Councils in one-fifth of prisons and two-thirds of probation units across England and Wales, representing around 30,000 justice-involved people a year. QUB and User Voice will work directly with three of these Councils in a series of workshops to collaboratively design the research project to be undertaken. In these workshops, Council representatives will be trained in the basics of research methodology and will lead a broad discussion about how to engage fellow prisoners in regards to their experiences of the COVID crisis. In order to make research design a ground-up process in which Council members assume a sense of ownership, QUB researchers will primarily play a "train the trainers" role, helping to build the capacity of the User Voice team already working with the Councils. At a minimum, however, the final design for a research project will involve at least 18 focus groups across at least 9 prisons or probation areas involving at least 150 prisoners and/or released ex-prisoners, as well as a survey to be distributed to around 1350 prisoners and former prisoners across at least 9 prisons and/or probation areas. The focus group interview protocols and the survey items will be determined by the trained peer researchers in collaboration with User Voice and QUB. Anonymised qualitative and quantitative data will also be analysed collectively with the trained peer researchers from the three User Voice Councils. Peer researchers will also participate in the process of writing up and disseminating findings.