Psychology Across HMPPS: Women's Directorate

I'm Sally Tilt. And I'm Dr. Karen Zahokken. And welcome to episode four of this forensic psychology podcast mini-series. In this series we're taking a tour around the five directure in the prison service, talking to some of our colleagues about their work. So next we're going to be talking to Poppy Marston and Becky Jung, who work in the women's directorate. Welcome Poppy and Becky. Hello. Hi. So Becky, let's come to you first. Tell us about your job and how long you've done that for. I've been in the prison service for just over 17 years. I started off working with young adult men and then for a couple of years as a psych assistant and then got a training job in what was the Northeast Psychology Service. And did the majority of my traineeship there? I was always based in a women's prison but worked with men as well across the Northeast. And then in 2017 when the women's estate became pit zone directorate, I opted to work full time in the women's prison. And I've been there ever since and I've been chartered since 2019. So chartered is a registration with the British Psychological Society isn't it as a forensic psychologist? Yes. Yeah. Great. I had no idea that you'd been in the service so long Becky. Be a long service award for you, sir. Poppy, what about you? I am a forensic psychologist in training in the women's estate. I joined shortly after the women's estate became its own directorate so I joined 2018. So I've been in the directorate for four years now and have just been based solely in the women's estate. But I've worked across multiple sites as well. Great. Thank you both. So interesting to hear about your varied experiences. We're going to find out a bit more about those. It is. And interesting to hear that both of you have spent most of your or if not all of your careers within the prison service working with women, certainly sort of a big chunk of it that you've described there. So you're perfect to answer my next question, which is about what a typical role looks like within the women's service. Perhaps if we can start with you, Becky, for a registered psychologist, what typically would a registered psychologist be doing? Well, in the women's estate is really, really varied actually. We do a lot of consultancy. I would say that probably takes up a good chunk of our time on a daily basis. So we would do a lot of consultancy to the prisoner fund managers. In the prison, where I work in my prison, we actually sit in the offender management unit with the prisoner fund managers so that we're always available for consultancy. So there are askers to consult on things like sentence planning. If they're working with complex prisoners, if prisoners have engagement issues or complex needs, then they would ask for our input. And they would also ask us for things like sequencing of interventions and what services are best suited to meet individual needs. We also do a lot of consultancy to the wider prison staff, especially for the more complex women that we work with. So we also have a framework in the women's estate called a STEM, which stands for support through enhanced management. And that is it helps to provide consultancy for the wider prison staff, for when we're working with women with more complex needs. So women who are at tight and risk of self-harm or suicide, high and risk of violence to themselves or others, or who just don't really engage in with the prison regime as well as they could be. So what that would entail is we would go and we would have a couple of sessions with the women and do a formulation with her about what her current needs are, where those needs have come from, and really gain a bit of insight into what is going on for that individual. And then we would build a support package around that to share with the staff that the staff could use to really guide best ways of working with that person. So that takes up quite a lot of our time. And part of that we would attend act assessments and act reviews for women that we have completed STEMs with as part of a multidisciplinary team. And can I hope in there just to check what an act is? So an act is a support document that is opened when a person in prison self-harm or if they are at a high and risk of self-harm or suicide. So that support plan will be opened with them and they will have regular reviews to check their wellbeing. They might have a certain rate of observations that staff have to check on them numerous times throughout the day to make sure that they're okay and that the mood hasn't dipped. Thanks Becky, that's helpful. There's so many terminologies that we're coming across as we have these chats with people so we're keen just to clarify them. So that's it, as you say, a process to keep people safe within prison-harm or risk of self-harm. Yeah. We also do a lot of one-to-one work in the women's estate because there aren't any accredited programs or interventions for women apart from the thinking skills program. A lot of work tends to be on an individual basis. So we might be referred women who have violent offenses to conduct some violence reduction work with them. We also have some emotional management work with them and we would do that on a one-to-one basis. We do a lot of case formulations and a lot of case file reviews to identify criminal genic need in the women and to identify ways to meet that need. So I'm posting to services within the prison who might be best placed to meet those needs. Thanks Becky, because that's a long list and one of the things that's coming out from that is the variety of people that it sounds like that you're having contact with. So while you are working directly with the women within the prison, you're actually providing it sounds like some sort of link in communicating their needs onwards to other people who might be having contact them in the prison. I'm just going to go back to something you mentioned about accredited programs because we've heard from some of our conversations with other people about the process of accreditation of some sort of intervention approaches and that's our internal process I guess within the prison service for recognising best practice within interventions. And that's something you mentioned isn't so present within the women's service. And is that because of the size of the estate or the differences in the need for the women? I would think it's a combination of the two to be honest. I think we did have a program available for women convicted of violence but that was recently pulled a couple of years ago that was that ceased to be. And I think it's because so many resources go into staff training and to the running of the interventions and the number of women who can access them is relatively low in comparison to the male estate. So if we think that women account for just over 4% of the whole prison population, it's a tiny percentage really. So that's probably got something to do with it. That's a really good number to hang on to actually isn't it? And I think it probably steers quite a lot of the way that we work differently within different parts of the estate. She's a 4% is it? It's an important number to hang on to. Thanks for that Becky. Poppy, I wonder if we can come to you next to describe any similarities or differences within the role of a trainee psychologist? Just to mirror what Becky said really, the role is just so varied which is one of the wonderful things in the women's estate. I guess we as trainees we are involved in a lot of the work that Becky's described. So we're involved in a lot of assessments of risk, assessments of IQ and also with the interventions as well. So obviously all of this work is under supervision. I guess that's the difference being in training. So we would design and deliver those sort of bespoke one-to-one interventions with people based on their kind of identified treatment needs. Those who are trained also deliver the fire setting intervention programme for prisoners. So recently because of Covid that has been done on a one-to-one basis but there's kind of scope to get that back up and running as a group as it has been designed. And then again, much as Becky said in similarity that we are involved a lot in the safety work as well. So looking at STEM under supervision, conducting a lot of those, attending at reviews and see-sip reviews. So yeah, we're involved in a lot of the safety work where we kind of support the safer custody team to then support the women that we work with. There's a lot of consultancy still, although that might differ slightly from qualified colleagues and also site by site as well. I think we see a lot in the women's estate as some sites do things slightly differently. But our consultancy might be in terms of kind of sentence progression. I've been involved in sentence planning from a multi-agency life sentence kind of risk approach as well. And then we can be involved in a lot of projects, I think, which is really exciting in the women's estate. There's a lot of kind of scope, a lot of opportunity to be involved in project work. And that doesn't necessarily have to be related to qualification. It can be a research outside of that. It can be just kind of ad hoc projects. So supporting the establishment, supporting the wider women's estate, but also just supporting our colleagues in the prison and probation service as well. So there's a lot of kind of exciting things going on. I guess the main difference I recognize is the balance of that qualification work in terms of the business need as well. So kind of. A lot of diary management, I think, on a day to day basis, trying to balance those two things. Yeah, I think we can all relate to that. Okay, I'm just wondering then, when you first started working with women in prison? Is there anything that stood out to you? Yeah, I guess when I first came in to the prison this day, I'd never worked in a prison before. So I'd worked with women outside of prison, but coming into prison, working with women, I think I was really struck by their experiences, their histories, and the significant amount of trauma that people had experienced. So I think a lot of the work that we undertake, whatever that is, whether that is risk assessments, whether that's interventions, or even the consultancy to other stuff, a lot of that does really relate to being trauma-informed and taking that approach to the work because it is so important in terms of the presentations that we experience and we see. That's really helpful, Papaya. One of the things we've talked about on the podcast is this trauma-informed way of working. I think in series two, I think it was the first episode, Sally, we talked to David, Prescott about that, didn't we? So if anyone wants to learn more about that, they could check that out. Becky, I'm just reflecting on the amount of years you said that you'd worked within the service and the significant amount of those with women. And from your perspective, if people are listening to this and they're thinking about applying to work in this area, what do you think it would be helpful for people to know about before they do that? So many things. I think it's really important to expect to find key differences between working with men and working with women and also to be prepared to do a bit of your own research to find out what those key differences are. A lot of the time the pathway to offending might be quite similar between men and women, but the way that those needs manifest and present are very very different and quite nuanced. One of the things with working with women is that a lot of their needs tend to be rooted in a background of trauma. Whereas men absolutely do experience trauma as well. What we see in the women's estate is that women's trauma seems to be a lot more gendered, a lot more pervasive, and a lot more cumulative than male trauma. And that leads to women coming to us with a whole range of complex needs and a real need for that multidisciplinary and multi-agency approach to help to meet all of those needs throughout their entire sentence and on to release as well. One of the other things that's really important to be aware of is the changing nature of the profile of women in prison. Years ago when I started working with women in prison, we had the majority of women were in for short sentences for non-violent crime. And when you read research and statistics about women in prison now, a lot of those old statistics are regurgitated and repeated. And it's not actually an accurate reflection of what we see in prison now. You know, the most recent statistics tell us that the majority of women in prison are serving over four years, they're in for violent offenses, and they have a plethora of really complex needs. That's really helpful to hear actually, Becky, because you should say people might be referring to that literature and expect something different from when they join. So, yeah, a really helpful thing to highlight for people who might be thinking about joining such a team. Yeah, it's sometimes the way that the statistics are reported as well. The best place to go to find them is on the Justice website and they have the current breakdown year by year of offense, type and sentence length and things like that. I guess I'm thinking one of the things you've talked about is almost a bleak background of the people that you work with, so traumatic experiences and you know, some of the challenges that people face. So I'm wondering what is you actually enjoy about the work that you do? Because I can imagine some of that can be really tough to face on a daily basis. So Poppy, could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, I think it's the ability to be creative in our role, the ability to bring our personality to the role, obviously within the confines of the evidence-based and our ethical codes, but I feel like that's really important to the women also to see that we ourselves are people and to bring that kind of more human element to the role can help people feel very supported. Particularly in really difficult times of their lives when they're having to revisit some of those really tricky histories and talk about things that are possibly some of the worst things that have ever happened to them, including the offending as well. It's something I really enjoy, you know, bringing that to the role, but equally, I think the culture within the women's estate psychology service is something that I just really enjoy being part of. It's a very supportive culture. We're kind of one big family because we are a smaller director, we are a smaller estate, we kind of celebrate each other's successes, almost everybody knows each other and it feels really supportive and you feel valued regardless of band as well. I think that's the thing that I've noticed most and the thing that I enjoy the most is that I may at this stage be in training, but actually I feel valued, I feel respected by my colleagues of all bands, right up to senior management, which I really enjoy about the role as well. I would definitely back that up and say that the women's estate team just have a really nice sense of belonging and we are all very supportive of each other. And I think that translates to the women that we work with as well because it is a smaller, client base that we have, we tend to get to know the women a lot better than I remember I've forgotten to know the men that are used to work with for example. In the male estate you'd be kind of popping in and out of prisons here and everywhere and doing bespoke pieces of work they're moving on to the next whereas in the women's estate you get to know the women so much better and you kind of feel like you're there for their whole journey or a large percentage of their journey. And that gives you more opportunity to really see the progress that is being made as well and to see women come in with these very complex needs and being part of helping to kind of almost build that scaffolding around her to make her stronger before she's released. I think that is something that keeps you wanting to go back to work every day even though it can be quite bleak at times and quite difficult. Seeing those successes is definitely what motivates me definitely. Oh, Poppy and Becky, thank you both so much. You've really painted a helpful picture, a little bit a snapshot of what life is like as a psychologist and a trainee psychologist within the women's service. So and thanks both for taking the time to join us today and if you're listening and you'd like to find out more about women in prison and working with women in prison you can find a full episode of this in series two of the podcast. There's one more episode in this mini series and we'll be talking to Harriet Chapman and Rebecca Ministro who both work in the Ministry of Justice's Directorate in Wales. So if you're interested in careers in forensic psychology in prisons you can follow us on Twitter at hmpppsicology or you can visit jobs.justice.gov.uk and do dig into the rest of this series to find out more about the full range of opportunities for psychologists in prisons. See you next time. you