A Scoping Review of Family Focussed Interventions to Prevent Prison Violence

Violence is an ongoing concern for many people who live and work in correctional settings and yet relatively little is known about the effects of institutional violence prevention efforts. This paper reports the findings of a scoping review of recent research relevant to understanding the influence of one factor, contact with family, that potentially influences institutional violence in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand where Indigenous peoples are over-represented in prison settings. A total of 15 different studies were identified that provided consistent evidence of an association between family contact and prison violence. The implications of this work for the development of evidence-based prison violence prevention strategies are discussed.