Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Corso di laurea in infermieristica - Sede di Modena
| Thesis Title | Prisons: context at risk for mental health? Comparison between two realities: Italian and English |
|---|---|
| Name | Cantini Elisabetta |
| Supervisor(s) | Nicolini Patrizia, Zucchi Federica |
| Academic Year | 2013/14 |
| Thesis type | Non research thesis |
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to make a comparison between the prison health assistance organization in two nations, The United Kingdom and Italy. In 2013 Italy was sentenced by the European court for the inhuman conditions within prisons. Due to this conviction and other scandals, Italy can’t be considered as a model of the “healthy prisons”. I choose the UK for the comparison because this nation has identified the health matter in prisons, especially the mental health matter, as a real problem, not only for the offenders but also for the prison workers. I carried out a bibliographic research using Pubmed and Google scholar to collect date for this thesis, and made contact with many authors to gain further insight to their data. Unfortunately there is a lack of the Italian papers about this topic and with some arguments a fair comparison wasn’t possible. The analysis of the papers gave evidence on the following issues: 65% of male offenders have a mental disorder; a lack of activities to employ offenders; how to preserve the parenting; ethnic minorities; substance misuse; overcrowding; the prevalence of communicable diseases and learning disabilities. In this context the emotional- psychological support is important and this appears to be clear to British authorities who involve offenders with supporting their peers, employ prison officers in the health care teams, and also prefer to employ mental health care nurses or learning disabilities nurses instead of generic registered nurses. All this is in place even if the British research nurses have admitted that only an holistic care approach would assure the “principle of equivalence”. The Italian prison nursing assistance is still generic and a nursing assistance centered on the emotional- psychological support and based on the health care team work, isn’t the hub of the rehabilitation- treatment plan for the offender yet.