Mental Health Problems among Prison Inmates: the Effect of Welfare Deficiencies, Drug Use and Self‐Efficacy

The changing picture of substance abuse problems among Finnish prisoners

“…Therefore, substance abuse treatment alone obviously does not provide the answer here. In Finland, as elsewhere, solutions have been sought by emphasizing measures to assimilate prisoners into society, both while serving their time and after release [29]. In addition to prison and social services, third sector organizations such as Criminals' Return to Society, currently operating in eight European countries [49], works actively towards this aim.…”

“…Over the last 10 years, Nordic researchers have increasingly focused on the issue of drug and alcohol use among prisoners, leading to empirical evidence of prison population over-representing the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, along with low education level, poor family background and social and health problems [25][26][27][28][29][30]. Research focusing solely on substance abuse among Finnish prisoners is scarce, but the issue is sometimes dealth with as a by-product of other research.…”

Exploring prison drug use in the context of prison-based drug rehabilitation

“…In Norway, 60-70% of prisoners report illicit drug use in the month prior to imprisonment (Friestad & Hansen, 2005), and approximately 50% of prisoners are considered to have a serious drug problem (Ødegård, 2008). Although most drug users tend to reduce their drug taking behaviour while incarcerated (Stöver, Weilandt, Zurhold, Hartwig, & Thane, 2008), a comprehensive body of research shows that drug use is common in prison settings (e.g.…”

Ten Years of Monitoring Illicit Drug Use in Prison Populations in Europe: Issues and Challenges

“…Variations in the approach to sampling include: surveying the entire population of all prisons in a country, reported by a few studies (Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers 2009; Krantz and Elmby 2009); sampling from all prisons; surveying the entire population of selected prisons; and applying a two-stage sampling strategy, whereby prisons are selected in the first stage, and the population to be sampled is then chosen. Random sampling is reported for a number of studies (Todts et al 2007;Sieroslawski 2007;Torres et al 2008;Lukasiewicz et al 2007;Paksi 2009;Elekes and Paksi 2004;Goderie 2009;Sieroslawski 2001;Torres and Gomes 2002;DGPNSD 2006;PNSIDA and DGIP 2000;Liriano and Ramsay 2003;Friestad and Skog Hansen 2005), but many other studies provide no information on the sampling method. The size of the prison population surveyed is not available for most of the studies listed in Table 2, and sample sizes -which vary from less than 100 to thousandsreflect different proportions of the prison population in different countries.…”