GamCare to work for tackling gambling harm in the Criminal Justice System
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Interventions Alliance, an organization aiming to bridge the gap between the social care sector and the Criminal Justice System, has announced a new partnership with GamCare, a gambling self-exclusion scheme that helps individuals control their gambling and seek adequate help. Long ignored in the prison population, problem gambling and gambling-related harm have had a toll on the people caught in the Criminal Justice System.
GamCare and InterventionsAlliance are hoping to change some of that. The partners will work on a new Cognitive Behavioral Therapy orCBT aimed entirely at reducing gambling-related harm in the Criminal Justice System and seek other benefits, such as reducing the rate of reoffending by treated individuals.
Interventions Alliance is perfectly fit for that purpose as a big part of the organization focuses on teaching individuals the necessary skills they would need to reintegrate back in society as meaningful and valuable individuals. The new program the partners are putting forth will take place over eight sessions and work in a group format.
Participants and trained therapists will seek to explore how gambling could be linked to crime and seek to inspire individuals and support them on their journey to change. This partnership is also a direct response to empirical evidence that the prison population has long suffered disproportionately from the effects of gambling addiction with people serving a sentence often not supported in their attempts to recover.
This may have had an adverse effect on their chances of becoming repeated offenders later on. The collaboration is equally important to GamCare as well, as it would enable the organization to collect more data and garner better insight into what impacts people and how different social strata are affected by gambling.
GamCare already has a network of partners through which it carries out similar tasks. In the meantime, Interventions Alliance Chief Social Worker and Executive Director Suki Binning welcomed the opportunity to be working with the organization. She said that through this collaboration, Interventions Alliance will have a chance to study gambling addiction in the Criminal Justice System and said that people who suffer from this illness are far more likely to commit crimes in the first place.
GamCare CEO Anna Hemmings was similarly hopeful about the new program. Hemmings said that GamCare was excited to be teaming up with Interventions Alliance on this ambitious problem. She assured me that the combination of GamCare and Interventions Alliance’s expertise will result in a better understanding of gambling addiction and also help people caught in the Criminal Justice System.
GamCare has run a number of successful programs over the years with one of its most recent ones, focusing on how women are impacted by gambling.
