Mr. Vivian Geiran:

In terms of the life sentence prisoners, we would engage with all life sentence prisoners when they are in custody because, apart from anything else, ultimately we will be supervising all of them when they are eventually released, assuming they are released, and, by and large, everybody who receives a prison sentence is released at some stage. On any given day we would supervise approximately 80 life sentence prisoners in the community and we work with a couple of hundred others who are in custody. The two main areas of focus for us in our work with life sentence prisoners are addressing the issues that may have contributed to their offending and reducing the risk of their reoffending. We also help them to prepare for release and address any issues that might need to be addressed in the context of their resettlement in their local community. Those are the areas we would address with them.

All life sentence prisoners would go through the Parole Board process. At the request of the Parole Board, we would prepare assessments on people serving life sentences, as would other services, and subsequently the Parole Board would make recommendations to the Minster regarding a prisoner's release or otherwise. Probation officers would be involved in that at every stage of the process.

Regarding probation officers' training in the area of mental health, I will ask Ms Doyle to respond to that question and following that response I will ask Dr. Burke to respond to the previous question on restorative justice.