Innovative Prison Systems (IPS) had the chance to present a poster about the MIRAD project at the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, which took place in Málaga, Spain, from the 21st to the 24th of September, 2022.
This year’s Conference provided an excellent opportunity to further disseminate the project on a European and international scale, as well as network with fellow academics and practitioners to introduce the initiative’s goals and activities. The poster’s specific goal was to emphasise the importance of effectively implementing radicalisation, disengagement, and reintegration programs. Special emphasis was placed on the importance of developing appropriate risk assessment tools, training prison, probation, and community staff in the field, and promoting collaboration among relevant agencies.
To this end, MIRAD will develop an evaluation framework for ensuring the trustworthiness and capability of NGOs involved in disengagement and reintegration programmes. Furthermore, the project will extend a previously developed radicalisation risk assessment tool, the Individual Radicalisation Screening (IRS), by creating ideology-specific add-on sheets tailored to right-wing and Islamist extremism. It will also use innovative methods to train staff on how to use the IRS tool and promote collaboration between governmental bodies and credible community organizations working on disengagement and reintegration.
MIRAD, which launched at the beginning of 2022, is now developing its mixed-method training approach, which will provide staff with quality training and learning opportunities on the use of the ideological and gender-specific IRS tool.
The MIRAD project is led by the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) (France), in partnership with IPS_Innovative Prison Systems (Portugal), Polish Platform Homeland Security (PPHS) (Poland), Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies (Spain), Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) (Bulgaria), KMOP Social Action and Innovation Centre (Greece), Les Militants des Savoirs (France), and the International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology (IACFP) (Belgium). The project is co-funded by the EU Commission’s Internal Security Fund – Police.
