The Custodial Review invites Sue Wheatcroft, a former inmate with a borderline personality disorder, to talk about mental health in prison. Here, Sue highlights the lack of resources available to prisoners who need mental health support and explains what she did about the problem on her release…

At the age of 55, I went to prison for the first time. I take full responsibility for the actions that led me there. However, I strongly believe that if I had received help from the mental health services, things would not have got so bad. I was desperate but received no help because I was ‘too ill to treat’. My story is not uncommon, and the more people who highlight what happens, the more chance there will be of changing attitudes and transforming the lives of people with mental illness.

The Custodial Review spoke to Alex Viccars, Senior Research Officer at The Forward Trust, about the work the organising does to tackle substance addiction in prisons – including female prison HMP Send…

The Forward Trust (formerly RAPt) has been empowering people to break the cycles of addiction and crime and move forward with their lives for over 25 years. We currently deliver substance misuse services in 18 UK prisons and two community services, reaching over 15,000 service users each year. Peer role modelling and lived experience of crime and addiction sit at the heart of our treatment approach – with 1 peer supporter employed for every 4 staff members, and 30% of our workforce are in recovery from addiction.

It has arguably never been more difficult to find good temp workers thanks to a frustratingly inefficient and expensive recruitment process. However, help is at hand, says TempRocket’s Andrew Johnston…

It’s no secret that finding the right people to add to your team cannot only be a very tough task, but also annoyingly time consuming and expensive, whether you’re recruiting for the police, prison service or customer and immigration services. And this is especially the case when it comes to tracking down good temporary workers, because the process on this side of the recruitment sector is particularly inefficient.

John Seddon, an iconoclastic management thinker, offers his insight into policing methods and how the system should be changed to reduce failure demand…

Failure demand is demand caused by a failure to do something or to do something right for the customer* – or in the case of policing, for the citizen. It is not uncommon to find that over 75% of demand into police forces is failure demand. Currently a few forces have clubbed together to fund an academic study into the volumes of failure demand into policing. I’d advise them not to bother. They won’t learn anything useful.

Failure demand is a signal, a signal of ineffectiveness. To remove it – as many large organisations have done – requires understanding the causes of ineffectiveness and, from there, designing a service that works for citizens. To put it another way, failure demand is systemic, you won’t get rid of it until you change the system.

Public sector contracts should no longer be given to the lowest bidder but awarded to “social business” companies that agree to share profits with staff and employ local workers, a leading businessman has said.

Phillip Ullmann of Cordant Group, one of the country’s biggest recruitment firms, said that British business needs to fundamentally change its approach in response to growing public distrust.

Dr Danielle McDermott, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at Leeds Trinity University, supported by co-author Dr Dominic Willmott, Research Fellow in Legal & Criminal Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, offer readers of The Custodial Review an academic insight in the rising problem of self-harm and violence in male prisons.

Prison Officer Dave Littlefair has been teaching Control and Restraint (C&R) techniques for the last ten years. Six months ago he was appointed to the post of NW Prison Officer Entry Level Training (POELT) Co-ordinator. His daily task is to supervise the eight week training course within which he is the specialist C&R Instructor and Examiner.The course includes a gap week during which delegates return to their home posting for practical experience.