Correctional Nursing Theorists

Everyday crimes are committed. Some of these offenses committed by perpetrators are more severe than others, and cause the individuals who carry out the crimes to be sentenced to time in the county or prison facilities. At the forefront of protecting these criminals from committing more crimes and jeopardizing the public’s safety are correctional officers. The main goal of corrections work is the safe and secure management and rehabilitation of justice-involved individuals, whether in locked facilities or within community supervision programs (Denhof, 1). Although, correctional officer’s sole job is to provide care, custody, and control for perpetrators, correctional officers have another job. That task is not to become subdued by the stress

In recent years, correctional facilities have begun to experience an influx of inmates who suffer with mental illness. Per Morgan, et al (2011), ?the United States has three times more individuals with severe mental illnesses in prisons than in psychiatric hospitals.? Most prisons in this country aren?t equipped to properly care for the mentally ill persons who enter the facility. Individuals with mental illness are more likely to be placed in prisons rather than a mental health institution to receive help to deal

In this article, the incarceration of the mentally ill is encouraged because it is safer than keeping them in mental institutions. It claims that mental institutions are extremely dangerous by their very nature and the nurses there are trained to treat the mentally ill, not to keep them from hurting themselves or other people. In prisons however, the

Maeve and Vaughn (2001) also state that a prison facility necessitates more self-awareness by nursing staff to provide ethical care since prisons are society’s way of punishing, serving justice, and deterring crime. Nel Noddings (1984) described two types of caring that nurses utilize. Natural caring is something that is innate to most. We learned how to care by being cared for. Ethical caring requires intention to operate with compassion despite the individual or circumstances. Maeve and Vaughn (2001) propose that correctional nurses often operate under ethical caring in order to overcome the obstacles faced due to an offender’s behavior or crime. Some of the ethical dilemmas Maeve and Vaughn described that nurses will face in correctional settings are: carrying out the death penalty; providing client confidentiality during exams and discussing diagnosis; inappropriate use of chemical restraints for security rather than medicinal purposes; working with underqualified medical personnel; providing care for offenders who are violent or have an addiction or mental illness; planning/referring offenders for appropriate care once released; caring for incarcerated mothers; and

The following summary is based on the information that was obtained from an interview of Mrs. Rayshondal Merrell a Licensed Practical Nurse for 9 years and enjoys everything about the job. Mrs. Merrell work at a state prison in a 21 bed infirmary as a Licensed Practical Nurse. The infirmary is designed to house inmates with acute illnesses as well as inmates who have returned from hospitals for more serious illnesses. Licensed Practical Nurses will conduct routine checks of these inmates or a daily basis.

The universal portion of Orem’s theory consists of the self care that a patient needs to meet their physiologic and psychosocial need. The developmental portion of the theory covers the care when coping through developmental stages, and the health deviation, which cover the care a patient need when theory health has

With the authors of this journal being registered nurses and having seen the first-hand accounts of these disparities, how these cries continued to be ignored. With these female inmates coming from low-income backgrounds, being often undereducated, and having few work skills (Hatton and Fisher, 1305), many of the stresses of life added on to the societal expectations of women can easily manifest into a valid psychological defect that can hinder them for the rest of their lives. Reports also show extensive histories of “childhood and adult violence, including both physical and sexual assault” (Hatton and Fisher, 1305), adding to the stressors, and causing an even worse decline in mental health. Yet, the lack of awareness and/or contributions to a fixable solution is as prevalent as mental illness amongst these imprisoned women. The goal of these institutions should be rehabilitation of these individuals, giving them a second chance, though it has fallen from its original purpose and now has become about control and power.

At any given time, a single corrections officer, can expect to be outnumbered by upwards of 400 inmates (Conover, 2011). It can be chilling to work in the midst of hundreds of inmates, some of which initiate attacks and inappropriate relationships. However, other issues have impacted the psychological health and physical safety of the staff. Detrimental factors have included heavy workloads, the prisons physical structure, and a lack of support from both peers and superiors. Each workplace issue has been in addition to role problems, specifically role ambiguity and role conflict (Schaufeli & Peeters, 2011). It is believed that anyone of these undesirable facets of prison should be enough to deter the public from attempting to enter such

For a start, as my semester topic, I subjectively selected to focus on individuals diagnosed with a mental health illness and how they are overrepresented within the criminal justice systems/continuum, specifically, the prison/penal system. In this paper, I will first introduce/describe what mental health looks like within the penal system and why it has become problematic, not only for forensic social workers, but for all criminal justice professions; such as; the court systems, law enforcement departments, parole and probation, prisons, and reentry to name a few. Overcriminalization, as discussed in lecture has become exacerbated by many motives, one of them being individuals with a mental health illness targeted and warehoused throughout

Private prisons face fierce criticism on how they deal with inmate’s health care. According to a nurse within one of these facilities, “private

Fawcett and Garrity (2009) have described nursing research as “a formal, systematic, and rigorous process of inquiry used to generate and test theories about the health-related experiences of human beings within their environments, and about the actions and processes that nurses use in practice”. In light of this statement, it would appear that further and expanded research in the area of correctional healthcare is necessary to develop strategies to effectively overcome access to care

Prison nurseries are a separate facility inside of a prison where mothers and infants are housed together, and insulated from the general population. The mother is responsible for the care of the child during the day, and the child sleeps in a crib in the mother’s cell at night. Most prison nurseries are only available to mothers who give birth to their babies while they are serving their sentence, while women who give birth before they go to prison are not qualified. Prison nurseries are very uncommon in the US, and typically when babies are born to mothers in prison and they can not be placed with family members, they will be placed in the care of the state and the foster care system.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case scenario within a correctional facility, define the housing population, including the number of pregnant females. The paper will give details as to the role of the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) and how the FNP will implement her fit into the facility. The State Board of Nursing for my state will be identified, and the Nurse Practice Act will be referenced as to their support of role implementation for the FNP and end with a conclusion.

Lorry Schoenly, PhD, RN, CCHP-RN, correctional nurse consultant and manager of the correctionalnurse.net blog thinks it is a common mistake that correctional nurses are less skilled or below-standard nurses. "Actually, it takes tremendous skill to care for inmate-patients. They are likely to have significant medical and mental health conditions that have not been treated prior to incarceration. Correctional nurses must be very skilled in assessment and must have good clinical judgment to manage emergencies, acute and chronic conditions, and behavioral issues in a low resourced and ethically challenging environment that is not focused on health care as a primary mission. A lack of awareness of the challenging work conditions of correctional nurses leads to the assumption that they have less nursing skills than acute care nurses. In fact, they often have more

Patton (2015) defines an interview guide as a series of topics or interview questions which the researcher is free to explore with the interviewee. Individual semi structured interview is a sequence of open questions related to the themes of interest previously prepared (Al-Busaidi, 2008). The questions will reflect the objectives of this study but at same time will permit participants to explore aspects that are significant to them rather than reflecting the researcher’s presumptions (Green and Thorogood, 2014). The advantage of an interview guide is that it helps the interviewer follow the same basic lines of enquiry with each person interviewed, and manage the interviews in a more systematic and comprehensive way (King and Horrocks, 2010). The subjects of the semi-structured interview will be based on nurses’ experiences about working and providing healthcare to women in prison. Nurses will be asked to describe, their experiences about providing healthcare to women in prison, their views about the quality of the prison’s healthcare to women and their perceptions of the barriers and facilitators of the provision of healthcare in