‘Their life in your hands’: the experiences of prison-based psychologists conducting risk assessments with indeterminate sentenced prisoners in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Assessing prisoners’ risk of recidivism and making risk-management recommendations is central to the work of prison-based psychologists. Risk assessment is particularly crucial when it involves indeterminate sentenced prisoners: psychologists’ recommendations have potentially significant consequences both for prisoners and the public. However, little is known about psychologists’ experiences of conducting such high stakes risk assessments. This paper reports the results of an exploration of psychologists’ experiences, via interviews and discussions with qualified, prison-based psychologists. Analysis using Grounded Theory methods identified one super-ordinate category of meaning, namely The Challenging Context of Risk Assessment, which comprised two sub-categories: (1) pressure of limited resources and (2) pressure of the environment. An additional major category, Risk Assessment as a Weighty Task, comprised three sub-categories: psychologists described (1) a weight of responsibility relating to the magnitude and range of their responsibilities; (2) a weight of expectation from colleagues to provide solutions, and (3) the trainee dilemma associated with the need to balance development of trainee psychologists’ competence in risk assessment with being held accountable for their work. Understanding qualified psychologists’ experiences of undertaking risk assessments with indeterminate sentenced prisoners can facilitate improvements and build on areas of existing good practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk assessment
• prisons
• indeterminate sentence
• psychologists

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Paul Morris and Dr Jo Bailey for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the United States the equivalent sentence is ‘life sentence with the possibility of parole’.

2 Statistics about the gender composition of different functions of the NOMS workforce are not in the public domain but personal experience of working in and around the prison service for over twenty years suggests that the vast majority of prison based psychologists are women.

3 The identity of the single male participant was protected by the use of a number of gender-neutral pseudonyms.

4 There is no legal requirement for qualified psychologists to receive clinical supervision (British Psychological Society, 2017) but a number of psychologist participants indicated that it would be beneficial.

5 Offender Managers are community-based probation officers who manage a client’s sentence once s/he is released from custody. Offender Supervisors are prison-based, and can be probation officers or specially trained prison officers who manage the progression of a client’s sentence whilst in custody.

6 This dilemma was also noted by one of the prisoner participants in another strand of this study (see Shingler et al., 2017 for details) who said ‘They are training but they have to learn in the real world setting. A chef doesn’t stay at home and cook in the kitchen he goes into er, a restaurant kitchen to train in the field, so it’s got to be done’.