PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to assess the health promotion needs of vulnerable young prisoners and the existing health promotion activities in custodial settings in seven European Union (EU) Member States. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The research comprised two components: the first involved identifying existing health promotion practices. The second involved mapping out young offende...

The rapidly expanding population of prison inmates has severely challenged the prison system's ability to effectively screen incoming inmates for mental disorders and mental health service needs. This study describes a comprehensive mental health screening of inmates at a maximum security prison, using a modified version of the Referral Decision Scale (RDS), a screening measure developed from ...

A profile of the personal and professional characteristics of the physicians who work in America's prisons was obtained by analyzing data from a larger study of all licensed physicians in the United States who worked in a prison at least 12 hours a month during the fall of 1979. Psychiatrists were not included, nor were physicians working in jails. The population of 382 prison physicians compri...

BACKGROUND Positive attitudes towards prisoners are important in securing the effectiveness of various correctional rehabilitation programs and the successful reintegration of prisoners after release. We wanted to investigate the attitudes towards prisoners among prison inmates, prison employees and college students. METHODS The Attitudes Toward Prisoners scale was completed by 298 inmates in...

BACKGROUND Rates of tuberculosis (TB) transmission in prisons are reported to be high worldwide. However, a recent systematic review identified only 19 published studies reporting TB incidence in prisons, most of them from the last century and only one from sub-Saharan Africa. OBJECTIVES To assess the persisting risk of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) among prison populations bene...

OBJECTIVES To describe and evaluate a pilot methadone maintenance program for heroin-dependent inmates of Las Malvinas men's prison in San Juan, Puerto Rico. METHODS Data from self-report of inmates' drug use before and during incarceration, attitudes about drug treatment in general and methadone maintenance in particular, and expectations about behaviors upon release from prison and from tes...

This article deals with prison library services in Italy, highlighting national and regional developments over the last twenty-five to thirty years. The article is divided into six parts: (1) a brief history of Italian prison libraries; (2) the structure and organization of the first institutional libraries (in Turin, Rome, Padua, Ravenna, Milan, Treviso, and Sardinia); (3) considerations by th...

BACKGROUND Many opiate users require prescribed medication to help them achieve abstinence, commonly taking the form of a detoxification regime. In UK prisons, drug users are nearly universally treated for their opiate use by primary care clinicians, and once released access GP services where 40% of practices now treat drug users. There is a paucity of evidence evaluating methadone and bupreno...

Prisons are a unique context where nurses are required to have specific skills to ensure that prisoners receive the same type of holistic care as anyone else out of prison, including spiritual care. This discussion paper focuses on understanding how nurses deliver spiritual care in Italian prisons where there are often limited resources and where organizational priorities hinder the provision o...

Up to 40% of prisoner patients in a general medicine outpatient service seek medical consultation for sleep problems. This paper provides a brief overview of what is known about insomnia and its treatment from studies on non-detained patients and discusses the relevance of the findings from studies in liberty for prison health care. The clinical and ethical issues of insomnia in prison are desc...