Ms Caron McCaffrey:

From a Prison Service perspective, all our services are tailored to try to target the factors that gave rise to a person's offending behaviour in the first place. In many cases, they are addiction and drug use. People may come into contact with the criminal justice system because of their addiction, they may be stealing because of that addiction or they may be engaging in public order offences. We have comprehensive addiction services in the Prison Service and we are currently building on them. We are looking at developing a peer-led recovery model so that people are not reliant on a drugs counsellor who comes in once a week. We would have peers in the community who can support people in their recovery. Dealing with people's addiction while they are in custody gives them the greatest opportunity when they leave to live a law-abiding life, so much of our focus is on that.

There are significant mental health issues among the cohort of people who are committed to prisons. There are much higher levels of intellectual disabilities and personality disorders than would be seen in the general community. People who have personality disorders suffer from emotional disregulation so they are not in a position to manage their emotions. Our psychology service does a lot of work helping people, giving them treatment programmes to develop skills so that they are in a position to be able to manage that when they leave.

Our recidivism figures have been reducing. We have seen a reduction of almost 7% since 2011. The three year re-offending rate for men is 61.4% and for women it is 65.6%. There is a divergence as regards age. One of the most important factors in recidivism is someone's 40th birthday. As people get older they are less likely to commit crime and tend to settle down. The recidivism rate for people over 50 is 27%, but the recidivism rate for people who are 21 is 83.6%, so we see younger people who engage in addictive behaviour in the community, who do not have stability or employment. Our psychology service particularly targets those younger people. I will ask our director of care and rehabilitation who is our former head of psychology to talk about what we do with 18- to 21-year-olds when they come into custody to ensure we can give them the most support we can.