Dear colleagues around the world,
This edition of the IACFP Bulletin marks a small but deliberate shift in focus. Alongside international news, conference and research information, we are creating a space for practitioners to write directly about psychological work happening in prisons and community corrections.
Anyone who works in prisons or community justice settings knows how hard it is to capture psychological work in neat, “gold standard” research designs. That’s not a criticism of research. It’s just the reality of the places we work in. Prisons are busy, under-resourced, and unpredictable. Psychological work isn’t tidy. It’s relational, often slow, and usually happens in small steps. And its value doesn’t always show up in Randomised Control Trials and recidivism figures.
The IACFP Bulletin is being reshaped with this in mind. Our intention is simple: to make space for practitioners to write about what they are actually doing, as it happens. That includes individual and group work, consultation, leadership roles, training and system-level matters that don’t fit easily into outcome tables. It’s a place to share experience, develop our thinking, discuss possibilities, and work through what research into psychological intervention should look like. This includes conversations about markers of successful intervention. Is it recidivism, or something else?
Most clinicians working in corrections are already stretched well past capacity. Caseloads are heavy, staffing is thin, and the work itself is complex. In that context, guaranteeing large-scale randomised controlled trials feels unrealistic, and sometimes completely detached from how services — and people — actually function. Even when these trials are attempted, sometimes they struggle to hold the reality of prison work: people moving in and out of custody, regime restrictions, cancelled or delayed sessions, and the messiness of release back into under-resourced communities.
This gap between ideal research conditions and real-life practice is where correctional psychology often gets misread. An example is the 2021 paper by Beaudry, Yu, Perry and Fazel (1), which set out to examine whether psychological interventions delivered in prison reduce recidivism after release, using randomised controlled trials as the basis for their review. The paper has been influential, but the way the question is framed — and answered — is deeply limited, and unfortunately, we as psychologists have a role to play in its findings.
In that review, interventions that have very little in common beyond the word “psychological” are bundled together and judged against a single outcome (recidivism). Programmes lasting a few hours are placed alongside year-long therapeutic community models with structured post-release support. Brief psychoeducational inputs sit beside intensive, relational work delivered over months in highly restrictive environments. When fundamentally different kinds of work are treated as if they are the same thing, the conclusions can only ever be blunt. However, perhaps we shouldn’t have been measuring and publishing some of this work in the first place. Should recidivism be an outcome measure following a couple of hours of therapeutic input? Are we placing a rod for our own back?
We need to be much clearer about what psychological work in prisons is actually designed to do. Psychology on its own does not necessarily stop people re-offending. Recidivism is shaped by housing, education and employment, mental health and addiction, family and social support, financial stability, stigma, and access to ongoing care in the community. Change happens through whole systems, not isolated interventions.
The role of psychology is foundational: stabilising mental health and personality, supporting emotional regulation, developing insight, managing risk, and helping people get to a point where they can engage with other services.
That isn’t a failure of psychological work. It’s exactly what it’s meant to do.
Recidivism is a blunt measure, and often a misleading one. It tells us very little about psychological change, progress, or readiness for life beyond custody. Safer prisons matter. Reduced distress matters. Fewer incidents, better relationships, and greater psychological stability matter — for people in custody, for staff, and for the communities people eventually return to. It leaves people ready to face the next part of their journey. A client once told me that psychological intervention in prison was really helpful but just the start of the journey; setting him up for a journey of hurdles he still had to face. I never forgot this statement.
It also matters how we read different bodies of research. The 2021 review referred to above does not look at medication, and pharmacological trials are explicitly excluded. Elsewhere in Seena Fazel’s wider programme of published research and conference presentations, associations are reported between psychotropic medication and reductions in violent re-offending among people with severe mental illness. However, these outcomes sit within systems of psychiatric care — inpatient treatment, secondary services, supported accommodation — not medication alone. The people most psychologists work with in prisons, particularly those with personality disorders, rarely have access to that level of support on release and often fall out of services entirely.
When findings from very different populations and support systems are read alongside one another without holding these differences in mind, it risks reinforcing an unhelpful split between psychology and psychiatry and ‘what works’.
Outcomes are shaped by an integrated system of care, not by single treatment approaches.
Framing the evidence otherwise doesn’t help the integrated, multidisciplinary work that prisons actually need.
I need to be clear, very high quality psychological research is available and ongoing. In New Zealand, Dr Ryan Botha and colleagues provide a careful evaluation of intensive rehabilitation for men at high risk of offending. They used improved matching methods to address long-standing methodological issues and this work is especially important at a time when skepticism about correctional rehabilitation is growing. This research is being presented at the upcoming ICPA International Research in Corrections Conference, New Zealand in March 2026. We need to strive for this research excellence across jurisdictions, where possible in collaboration with each other. However, where this kind of research is not possible, this Bulletin provides an alternative space to write about what else is happening in practice. This Bulletin is an invitation — not to turn away from research, but to widen the conversation.
We hope you enjoy this first iteration, which features new mental health services in Norway, work with people who are violent in Singapore and developments in psychologist recruitment in Ireland.
Join the conversation.
We want to hear from you. Please contact Tia Tourville at community@myiacfp.org or via our LinkedIn page to submit a short piece about the work you are doing. All we ask is that you include an email address so people can get in touch if they want to talk it through further.
Dr Emma Regan
IACFP President
(1) Beaudry, G., Yu, R., Perry, A. E., & Fazel, S. (2021). Effectiveness of psychological interventions in prison to reduce recidivism: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(9), 759 – 773. https://doi.org/10/1016/S2215-0366(21)00170-X
