Raising awareness about mental health to promote better interagency work and better outcomes for offenders.
The AWARE project has been selected for funding. AWARE stands for “Cross-sectoral awareness building about the mental health needs in the criminal justice system and on release.”
The overall objective of the AWARE project is to train the relevant criminal justice professionals to recognise, refer and/or treat moderate to severe mental health problems within the limits of daily prison and probation systems and to promote a better integration between agencies working in prisons and probation services, mental health, substance abuse, and resettlement.
The aim of the training is both to reduce stress factors for staff and to deliver more effective outcomes for the successful resettlement of prisoners.
Thus, the target groups of this initiative include offenders, prison staff, judicial staff, mental and public health staff and civil society/NGOs’ staff working in EU prison or emergency services, social services and any other personnel working with prisoners or former prisoners in prisons or in the community.
The project is led by the Bremen Senate of Justice and Constitution (Germany), and the partners of the consortium are IPS_Innovative Prison Systems (Portugal), BSAFE LAB of UBI University (Portugal), CPIP – Center for Promoting Lifelong Learning (Romania), the Athens Lifelong Learning Institute (Greece), the New Bulgarian University (Bulgaria) and the ICPA – International Corrections and Prisons Association.
The AWARE project is planned to start in September 2018 and end in February 2021 with funding from the Erasmus+ programme, Key Action 2: Cooperation for Innovation and Exchange of Good Practices, Strategic Partnerships for Adult Education.