Minister Byron Camilleri announced the investment of €500,000 in a project with Mid-Dlam Għad-Dawl, ensuring that prisoners and their families receive therapy.

The project will help prisoners with five measures: case management, therapy sessions, sessions on parenting education, individualised and specialised psychotherapy, group therapy. Their goal is to reduce the probability of recidivism, reduce intergenerational criminality and finally reduce the social exclusion of the prisoners’ families.

Family therapist Dr Charles Azzopardi said that research was conducted with families of prisoners in order to identify what their reaction was in the past few years. “A lot of families need psychological help. These families end up disadvantaged and would need to reconstruct their lives from the very beginning. With this project, we will help the people who need rehabilitation. I will offer specialised help to these people,” Azzopardi said.

Minister for Home Affairs, Law Enforcement and National Security, Byron Camilleri, noted that one out of three persons who are sent to prison had previous family member/s who also served a sentence.

“They usually have long sentences, and fall into recidivism. We see that it is a vicious cycle, sometimes even spanning 5 generations,” Minister Camilleri noted.

However, Camilleri noted that one should not look down on these people, as they are human beings as well, but rather help to integrate them back into society. “The circumstances are never easy; no one needs to judge these people. We have the obligation as policy makers to address this situation, as it wouldn’t be only the prisoner who wins but also society as a whole,” Camilleri remarked.

“We have a duty with these victims as a government and society, we need to assure that there are opportunities for these prisoners and their families,” the minister concluded.

Asked by The Malta Independent about the details as to how this project is going to aid prisoners and their families who fall into recidivism, Chairperson of Mid-Dlam Għad-Dawl, George Busuttil, said that they are hoping to help prisoners realise why they are going to prison. “With the help of their families and this project, we hope that they understand what their problem is, realise their mistakes in the past, to sympathise with the people who possibly were victims of their crime and hopefully stop from committing any more crimes.”

Busuttil did note, however, that when it comes to elderly prisoners, it might prove to be a more arduous task to help them, but when there are people who are sent to prison for the first time, things may be different. “Naturally, things sound simple when you say them, as for example it is difficult for elderly people to change when they have spent their whole life in recidivism, but there are a lot of people who are sent to prison for the first time, so we hope that he doesn’t repeat the same mistake,” he said.

Asked about Alex Dalli’s – the prison director – role in this project, Busuttil remarked that one of the signees of this document is the prison director, so they have to work together. This should be done “by having access to the prisoners and identifying the prisoners which can benefit from this project. This is where therapy starts with the prisoner, his family, and in the future, both of them together might benefit.”