Conducting prison-based research during the COVID-19 pandemic and the value of involving people with lived experience

In May 2023 and 1221 days following the initial reporting of an outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, the WHO Director-General announced an end to the public health emergency over the global outbreak of COVID-19 (World Health Organization, 2023). The pandemic was finally over!

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was not an equal experience for all of society, with some vulnerable groups affected more than others. For those living in prison, qualitative work conducted by correspondence indicated that COVID-19 had a significant impact upon prison life (Maycock, 2022). Across the prison estate in England and Wales, unpredictable and inconsistent levels of self-harm were observed amongst prisoners during prison lockdowns (Gallagher, 2023). Such impacts almost certainly occurred worldwide. In England, as the pandemic established itself and resultant governmental rules applied, it soon became clear that prisoners were being exposed to feelings of heightened and extended isolation and separation from their loved ones, which seemed to be having a detrimental effect upon their mental health and wellbeing.

Alongside these additional pains of imprisonment, efforts to continue to offer high-quality support to prisoners were also affected. Perhaps, this brings us closer to understanding how much less well-resourced countries manage limited access to clinical care and the resourcefulness that may follow in engaging prisoner-peer workers (Thekkumkara et al., 2023). Research is an essential aspect of progress in this regard, but, under COVID-19, research teams were also experiencing unpredictable and unfamiliar constraints. Within this editorial, we set out the experiences of our own research team and the significant contingencies that were necessarily developed in response to these. Like Thekkumkara et al. (2023), we had to be innovative in the face of resourcing difficulties, and our research included prisoner-peer work. In the Prevention of Suicide Behaviour in Prison: Enhancing Access to Therapy (PROSPECT) study, however, we had the added advantage of strong lived experience peer partnership in the research team.