A narrative review of mental health support for people during transition from incarceration to community: the grass can be greener on the other side of the fence

Abstract

Background: Despite significant need for mental health services targeting the requirements of inmates transitioning into the community there is little research about successful recovery-oriented or person-centred transition programs.

Aims: This systematic narrative review brings together existing evidence to inform policymakers and practitioners about current practice in transition support, and barriers and facilitators of effective practice.

Method: We carried out a systematic narrative review of recovery-oriented or person-centred mental health support programs supporting transition from incarceration to the community. Results were obtained from a systematic search of Medline, PubMed and Scopus databases.

Results: We found 23 papers which met the paper inclusion criteria along with four other papers which were identified incidentally.

Conclusions: Identified barriers to the implementation of effective transition support programs are: administrative problems leading to ineffective in-reach into correctional facilities or untimely support, lack of support for immediate needs meaning that inmates deprioritise their mental health needs, a lack of ongoing program resources and poor communication between correctional facilities and mental health services. Enablers for transition reflect the inverse of these barriers, alongside other successful strategies including medical home models, regionalised programs, programs which target connections with primary care, nurse-led patient-centred health programs and peer support initiatives.

Keywords:

• Mental ill-health
• prison
• narrative review
• person-centred
• recovery
• transition support
• stepped care
• correctional

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

This work was supported by Inner West Partners in Recovery Flexible funding.

Notes

¹ We acknowledge the contested nature of debate around the terminology to provide those that have been incarcerated and the different administrative meanings given to the terms “prison” and “jail” in different contexts. For that reason, we use the words “correctional facilities”, “incarceration” and “inmate” as they describe a state of being secluded from the community.