The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) has in place a comprehensive drug treatment framework, based on the National Treatment Agency’s revised Models of Care, to address the different needs of drug-misusers in prison. The interventions available are designed to meet the needs of low, moderate and severe drug misusers—irrespective of age, gender or ethnicity.
NOMS does not collate centrally the number of individual prisoners accessing drug interventions. However, the following table shows the number of interventions delivered in the last full financial year (2007-08) in adult prisons by intervention type. Individual prisoners may have accessed more than one of these interventions in the time period.
Intervention type Interventions delivered 2007-08 Intensive Drug Rehabilitation Programmes1 (starts) 11,319 CARATs (substance misuse triage assessments) 65,823 Substance misuse detoxification programmes2 46,291 Maintenance prescribing programmes 12,518 Total 135,951 1 Programmes available in prison are split into four main categories: “cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT)”, “The 12-Step approach”, “Therapeutic Communities (TCs)”, “Short Duration Programme (SDP)”. 2 Drug and alcohol detoxification data cannot be disaggregated.