Coping with the COVID crisis in prison

Prisons have emerged as hotbeds of contagion during the COVID-19 health emergency. To try to prevent the spread of the virus, prisons in England and Wales have subjected prisoners to conditions of severe lockdown, confined to their cells for 23 hours per day, with visits, therapy and education effectively suspended for more than three months. Little is known about the impact of this unprecedented shift in penal conditions on prisoners' mental health and well-being as all prisons research has been effectively suspended during this time. The proposed co-production between Queen's University Belfast and the User Voice charity would represent an extremely innovative participatory research project involving prisoners and former prisoners in leadership roles in every stage of the research from design to analysis. This research project would utilise User Voice's democratically elected Prison Councils that operate in one-fifth of prisons and two-thirds of probation areas across England and Wales, representing around 30,000 people a year. Through this partnership, we are proposing a three-phased, 18-month collaborative project to co-design and co-produce key findings from prisoner insights on the impact of COVID-19 on prisoners with a focus on what should happen next to transition out of the crisis. The research will involve 18 focus groups and a survey to be delivered to prisoners across 9 facilities in England and Wales, all delivered by peer researchers trained by experienced researchers at User Voice and QUB.