Morag MacDonald, James Williams, David Kane
Detainees are a particularly vulnerable group in society and face a wide range of health issues that are often associated with their offending behaviour, yet many fail to receive the healthcare that they need. The authors’ research indicates that continuity of care, sometimes known as throughcare, is essential to successfully reducing recidivism among offenders and helping them to become contributing members of society. This article uses the prisoner’s journey as its framework and draws fromtwo major European research studies funded by the EU to identify the requirements for building a successfuland equitable throughcare process for detainees. The key findings are that, at every stage of the prisoner’s journey, there are gaps in throughcare, allowing prisoners’ health problems to go undetected and untreated, which in many cases leadsto offending behaviours, recidivism and the ‘revolving door’ into prison.
