Greenspace in prison improves well-being irrespective of prison/er characteristics, with particularly beneficial effects for younger and unsentenced prisoners, and in overcrowded prisons

Abstract

In this paper, we present evidence of estimated significant associations between greenspace and prisoners’ self-reported well-being, self-harm and violence in prisons in England and Wales. Refining and extending our previous research that estimated the relationship between greenspace and self-harm and violence while controlling for the effects of prison characteristics (e.g. prison size, over-crowding and security level), the findings in the present study show that greenspace remains significantly related to self-harm and violence when we additionally control for prison population characteristics (such as prisoner age, ethnicity, sentence length) and when we use additional self-reported indicators of well-being. Furthermore, our findings also show that the beneficial effects of greenspace appear to be particularly prominent in prison establishments that suffer from overcrowding or hold relatively large shares of younger and un-sentenced prisoners. Finally, our results reveal that greenspace has important impacts on the inter-relationships between self-reported well-being, self-harm and prison violence.

Toxic Prisons? Local Environmental Quality and the Wellbeing of Incarcerated Populations

“…Like Toman and others, we lack health data for incarcerated populations, but instead we are able to deploy proxy data for prisoners' wellbeing in a more general sense, namely data for incidents of self-harm and violence published annually by the UK government. Our contention here is that, as argued by Moran et al [16], high levels of self-harm, violence or both are clearly indicative of a lack of wellbeing, and that as their work has demonstrated, in our study context self-harm and violence are very strongly correlated with poor self-reported wellbeing and a high incidence of mental health problems [16][17][18][19]. We use data from a set of prisons in England and Wales to estimate regression models that relate self-harm and prison violence to indicators of environmental quality, whilst controlling for prisoner and prison characteristics that are commonly found to affect prisoner behavior and wellbeing (e.g., prison size, age of prisoners, age of prisons and percentage of unsentenced prisoners) [21][22][23].…”

“…The question of what influences prisoner wellbeing features in a set of recent studies by Moran et al [16][17][18][19]. In the absence of direct indicators of prisoner wellbeing, these studies take self-harm and prisoner-on-prisoner violence as indicators of (a lack of) prisoner wellbeing.…”

“…However, the observation of a paucity of research conclusively linking these conditions to resulting wellbeing effects still holds [15]. So far, only the work of Moran and colleagues [16][17][18][19], which identifies a statistically significant relationship between greenspace within and around prisons and prisoners' wellbeing, has been able to robustly link characteristics of the environment to outcomes for incarcerated populations.…”

“…Recent evidence attesting to the benefits of nature in prisons demonstrates that significant wellbeing effects derive from the presence of greenspaces. The work of Moran et al [16][17][18][19], demonstrating a robust connection between greenspaces within and around prisons (including where greenspaces may not be visible to those benefiting from them) [18] and prisoners' wellbeing, has already been cited as evidence for changes to prison design (e.g., [29]). However, in order to support the introduction of more biodiverse greenspaces in prisons and to temper the persuasive arguments about cost and security, policymakers require evidence of the ways in which biodiversity might influence the wellbeing of incarcerated populations and by extension the ways in which prisons can be managed.…”

“…The motivation for including these variables is twofold. First, there is ample evidence that characteristics of prisoners are related to prisoner wellbeing [19,35,36]. By controlling for these characteristics, we therefore reduce the possibility that estimated associations between environmental quality and prisoner wellbeing are affected by omitted variable bias.…”