Seminar Background 

Contemporary prisons are increasingly characterised by a proliferation of interventions intended to address mental distress, support progression, and facilitate rehabilitation. Drawing on qualitative research with ethnographic sensibilities presented in Navigating Mental Health in the Male Open Prison (Schreeche-Powell, 2025), this guest lecture examines how this intervention-saturated landscape shapes the experiences of men transferring to Category D open prisons in England and Wales. While open prisons are commonly imagined as less punitive and more rehabilitative environments, the transition into them represents a psychologically complex and destabilising phase: a double liminality between imprisonment and freedom.

The presentation introduces the concept of intervention-itis to describe the inflamed expansion of programmes across the penal estate, where enduring systemic problems are met with limited, often insufficient interventions. Using peer-led induction as the focal initiative, the talk explores how a programme designed to provide support at moments of vulnerability can give rise to iatrogenic outcomes: harms that are produced, exacerbated, or sustained by the intervention itself. Drawing on interviews with formerly imprisoned men and prison officers, the lecture reveals the peer support paradox whereby mentees feel abandoned and migrate away from formal support precisely because it fails them.

These dynamics are situated within broader shifts towards responsibilisation, managerial practices, and forms of institutional withdrawal that redistribute emotional and practical labour onto prisoners. By foregrounding the tensions between care, control, and autonomy in late-modern imprisonment, the discussion invites critical reflection on what meaningful mental health support in custody should entail, and asks whether, in attempting to help, penal institutions may inadvertently reproduce the very pains they seek to alleviate. 

Biography

Ed is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and programme leader in Criminology and Criminal Psychology at The University of Greenwich and an Associate Lecturer in Social and Forensic Psychology. Ed is interested in all aspects of research surrounding prisons and penal policy, with particular focus on prisoner mental health and wellbeing, safer custody and power-sharing initiatives in prison. Ed is also interested in the programme theory and impact evaluation of interventions in custodial settings as well as a broader interest in punitiveness within the Criminal Justice System in Western Europe. Ed is passionate in the enactment and study of lived experience to offer new criminological perspectives and is an active member of the British Convict Criminology Group. Ed also acts as an expert witness regarding prison conditions in England and Wales.

Navigating Mental Health in the Male Open Prison, is published by Emerald, and can be found here

A Seminar hosted by the UCC Department of Sociology and Criminology, and ISS21 Crime and Social Harm (CSH) Research Cluster All Welcome.