By Prison Reform Trust

With the advent of the 21st century, there has been increased emphasis on the ‘movement for public and service user involvement in human service education and research’, which constitutes ‘the knowledge base of the services and practitioners we may all need to turn to at particular times in our lives for help and support’ (Beresford & McLaughlin 2020). Terminology such as ‘service users’, ‘experts by experience’, and ‘people with lived experience’ are somewhat broad and contested (see Livingstone & Cooper 2004; Repper & Breeze 2007; McLaughlin 2009), and seek to describe individuals and groups who have first-hand experience of or have been in contact with a range of services (typically but not exclusively provided by the public sector) and have amassed expertise related to the impact of these services. This includes sectors such as physical and mental health, social care, education, as well as criminal justice, in particular prisons and probation. Inclusion of the perspectives of service users in the fields related to social work, health and mental health services increasingly constitutes embedded practice. The following report: • Provides a rationale for engaging service users in prison officer training. • Summarises key literature on what makes a high performing prison officer, with emphasis on the areas where the perceptions of staff, prisoners, policy makers and experts without lived experienced overlap. • Explores examples of service user involvement with staff training from the literature.

Literature searches were conducted using GoogleScholar and idiscover. While there has been a marked increase in literature related to service user involvement in research and evaluation practices, there remains a distinct deficiency in literature related to their involvement in the recruitment and assessment of staff. This is especially acute in the field of criminal justice, in which service users continue to complain of paternalistic or distrusting attitudes and tokenistic attempts at inclusion outside of programmes related to peer mentoring (Buck et al. 2020). Academic literature analysing service user involvement tends to approach the topic from the perspective of the experience of service user participation in research. Methods employed tend to be qualitative in nature, focus on storytelling, focus groups and interviews, with small samples, or take an autobiographic or semi-biographic approach. Outside the academic literature, the focus tends to be on positioning statements, statements of purpose, and advice and toolkits. Considering the absence of pertinent literature, this review draws on grey literature, including publications, studies, and reports in the fields of mental health and social care to demonstrate that a) meaningful inclusion of service users in staff recruitment and evaluation is possible, and b) that there are several methods pertinent to this area of research that exist within the broader literature

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2024, 45p.