Maghaberry Prison

Psychology Services

At present the small Psychology Team provides input to many aspects of Maghaberry's objectives to address offending behaviour.

 Enhanced Thinking Skills

The Enhanced Thinking Skills programme runs for 22 sessions over a 3 month period and is delivered to groups of 8-10 prisoners. The aim of the course is to develop a range of thinking skills that will allow individuals to solve problems more effectively and to achieve goals in a socially acceptable way.

Psychologists use psychological tests and structured interviews to assess needs and to measure change in the programme participants. Facilitators on this programme are drawn from probation, prison officers, education and psychology.

 Sex Offender Treatment

The main programme for sex offenders runs over a 9-10 month period providing 250 hours of group therapy for 8 men. In this programme participants begin to look at their offending in a structured way to understand causal factors and the impact on victims of their sexual offending. to build empathy and an insight into the damage they have caused. They also identify risk factors and coping strategies to manage their risk in the future. The course employs a variety of approaches including the use of psychodrama as part of the victim empathy work.

Facilitators for this programme are again drawn from probation, psychology and include prison officers.

At the end of the treatment a full psychological risk assessment is completed to guide ongoing support and management of the individual case.

For those men who have sexually offended and who are not admitting their guilt, we offer short information group meetings on sexual offending. The purpose of this is to engage participants in discussions about issues that may help to move them out of denial.

A booster relapse prevention course is offered to men who have completed the core sex offender programme 12-18 months prior to their release. This aims to ensure that risk factors have been fully identified and to consolidate skills in managing the risk.

 Violent offenders

In the future we hope to introduce a group programme for violent offenders and an extended anger management programme.

 Work with life sentence prisoners

For life sentence prisoners Psychology provides assessment and individual offence related work. To dated this has been in the latter part of the individual's sentence. Our aim would be to engage life sentence prisoners much earlier in their sentence.