Correctional Services all over the world are increasingly recognizing the potential benefits of engaging both offenders and ex-offenders to serve in a peer-support capacity, as mentors, and even as caseworkers, addictions counsellors and in various other service-delivery roles both in prisons and in the community. The research indicates clearly that the support work of these individuals with ‘lived experience’ can be quite rehabilitative; it can motivate change and have a lasting impact in challenging criminal identities. ICPA and our Practice Transfer Advisory Committee are pleased to host this Learning Academy Session in order to highlight how individuals with lived experience (AKA ‘experiential knowledge’) are being acknowledged and, in many instances, how they have developed innovative service-delivery models to complement and enhance the efforts of correctional services. The Learning Academy will provide an overview of the research evidence supporting peer involvement in correctional practice. Several examples of model programs from the US, Canada and Norway will be profiled, with the views of individuals with lived experience being front and center. In the second part of the Learning Academy, there will be an opportunity for a broad range of discussion on the ‘rehabilitative’ potential, and both the opportunities and challenges for more fully integrating Peer Mentoring and Peer Support within correctional practice.
