Female prisoners, aftercare and release : residential provision and support in late nineteenth century England

This article examines the release and aftercare of female prisoners in England during the late nineteenth century. Primarily it seeks to illuminate the use of residential provision for women who had been released from both convict and local prisons, contrasting the two systems and suggesting how such institutions may have affected the women's subsequent offending. The research presented here draws on two sets of data, the material on local prisons uses a case study of female prisoners at Stafford prison (Turner, 2009; 2011) and the convict prison data draws on the licensing and release of female convicts collated for a recent ESRC funding project on the costs of imprisonment (Johnston & Godfrey, 2013a). This article outlines and reflects upon aftercare and residential provision for women leaving prison, during a period when a woman released from prison was regarded as 'the most hopeless creature in the world' (Reverend William Morrison cited in Gladstone Committee Report, 1895). Aftercare and support was variable for those leaving local prisons, but for convict women released on conditional licence to a refuge, this could offer them the opportunity to build a new life after release

Disability and the Victorian Prison: Experiencing Penal Servitude.

This article uncovers the hidden experience of prisoners with physical disabilities in the Victorian prison system. This is a largely under-researched area, hampered by both the limitations of historical records of prisoners and the lack of interest in social histories of disability.1 Borsay suggests that this lack of interest is due partly to the relatively recent development of social history, but also that social history has tended to focus upon the social experiences of everyday life directed towards the socio-political inequalities of poverty, class, gender and race.2 Histories of disability have thus continued to be marginalised and that ‘social exclusion has been matched by intellectual exclusion’.

National Indigenous Palliative Care Needs Study

This study involved extensive consultation with the community to identify the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in palliative care

Analysing motivation to do medicine cross-culturally : the international motivation to do medicine scale

Vaglum, Wiers-Jensen & Ekeberg (1999) developed an instrument to assess motivation to study medicine. This instrument has been applied in different countries but it has not been studied cross-culturally. Our aims were to develop a Motivation to do Medicine Scale for use in international studies and to compare motivations of UK and Spanish medical students (UK: n= 375; Spain: n= 149). A cross-sectional and cross-cultural study was conducted. The Vaglum et al. (1999) Motivation to do Medicine Scale (MMS) was used. The original MMS factor structure was not supported by the Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Exploratory Factor Analyses within each country identified four factors: 'People', 'Status', 'Natural Science' and 'Research'. Students scored higher on the 'People' and 'Natural Science' than on the other factors. The UK sample scored higher than the Spanish sample on the 'Research' factor and there were greater difference between genders in Spain for both 'People' and 'Research' factors. The scale is suitable for use in cross-cultural studies of medical students' motivation. It can be used to investigate differences between countries and may be used to examine changes in motivation over time or over medical disciplines

Online Supportive Conversations and Reflection Sessions (OSCaRS): A Feasibility Pilot with Care Home Staff during the Pandemic

Care homes care for people with complex needs, supporting them to the end of life and are now being seen as the ‘de facto’ hospice. Reflective debriefing for care home staff has been found to help support staff and provide an educative and communicative function when a resident dies. Pre-COVID-19, one of the authors had been conducting reflective debriefings face-to-face with care home staff but when COVID-19 struck, face-to-face sessions were impossible. An online format was developed with the aim of providing emotional support and practice-based learning in relation to death and dying through reflection. This study assessed the acceptability and feasibility of delivering online supportive conversations and reflective sessions (OSCaRS) on palliative and end of life care to care home staff during the pandemic. A mixed methods study design was undertaken in April to September 2020. Qualitative data comprised of digital recordings of sessions and semi-structured interviews with OSCaRS participants, managers and session facilitators. An online survey was sent to all staff and had a response rate of 12%.  Eleven OSCaRS were conducted over ten weeks. Thirty-four staff members attended one or more sessions. Three overarching themes were identified from the data: pressures of working in a pandemic, practicalities of delivering online support and, practice development opportunities. Engaging care home staff in online structured supportive conversations and reflections in relation to death and dying is acceptable, feasible and valuable for providing support with the pressures of working in a pandemic.  There is value for OSCaRS to continue as online sessions as they provide care home staff access to practice-based learning and support from professionals and allows specialists based in a range of settings to in-reach into care homes in an efficient way. Future implementation must consider the availability of sufficient devices with cameras to aid participation, timing and frequency of sessions to accommodate staff workflows, the engagement and support of managers and post-session support.  

'On Licence: Understanding punishment, recidivism and desistance in penal policy, 1853-1945'

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British legislators reacted to the perceived growth in a hard core of violent repeat offenders and struggled to fi nd solutions to the problem of recidivism. The concept of dangerousness, and the potential threat posed by those people who appeared to be less affected by civilising processes that appeared to be effective in making Britain a safer place to live, have since been a recurring topic of study for researchers of nineteenth-century society. 1 Others, such as Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, have focused more on legislation such as the Penal Servitude Acts (1853–64), Habitual Offender Acts (1869–91) and the Preventive Detention Act (1908), which were designed to incapacitate offenders through the imposition of long prison sentences and extended police supervision. 2 In an attempt to make the system to work effectively, a vast bureaucracy was created which was responsible for the identifi cation and tracking of many thousands of former prisoners and convicts. This served to create a huge range and number of archived written documentary records – many of which can now be utilised by historians to examine the impact of particular forms of legislation on offenders and the length of their criminal careers. In this chapter we present some case studies in order to outline both the possibilities, and also some of the possible pitfalls, of using these bureaucratic records in modern research. We contribute to the debates initiated by Radzinowicz and Hood by examining the impact of penal practices and policies on repeat offenders in order to understand the relative effects of punishment and surveillance, and also other signifi cant events in individual offenders’ lives, on their offending over the whole course of their lives