Offender Management: Reducing hazards and building resilience

Abstract

This article examines the psychological impact of working in a multi-agency team managing registered sexual and violent offenders. A review of the nature of the role and data collected from psychological surveillance identifies personal and work-related hazard and resilience factors. The study found that much of the variance in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma could be predicted by the psychological surveillance survey's resilience and hazard measures; each mental health condition had a different set of predictors with some common features. The findings are a first step towards increasing the resilience of multi-agency offender management teams with suggestions for reducing hazards and improving individual and team resilience. These findings can help reduce the mental health problems experienced by offender managers working with registered sexual and violent offenders in prisons, probation and policing.