Ms Maureen Mulligan:

A group of prisoners would work through the programme over a month. There would be a pre-admission of ten to 30. In the UK, we expanded it to 19 prisons. The recommendation was that it be made available throughout the prison system. In Ireland, we could have a programme for women prisoners, young offenders and male prisoners.

We included mandatory drug testing as part of the programme. The prisoners were in a full-time programme Monday to Friday and there were activities for them at the weekend. In the United Kingdom requests started to come from all over the system to be transferred to the prison. Eventually one prison became a recovery prison and the prisoners were offered an opportunity to participate in a programme which, if they completed successfully, helped their parole or ongoing sentence management. It was an option as part of their sentence management.