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Introduction
The well-being of incarcerated individuals is a growing concern. The 2019 report of prisons in England and Wales described prison conditions as “plagued by drugs, violence, appalling living conditions, and a lack of access to meaningful rehabilitative activity” (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, 2019, p. 7). Additionally, a considerable body of literature indicates that well-being within prisons is notoriously poor (Woodall and Freeman, 2020), and statistics suggest that reported incidents of self-harm in English and Welsh prisons in 2018 exceeded 45,000, almost 10,000 more than in 2017 (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, 2019).
Well-being is a multi-dimensional concept which refers to a range of physical, psychological and spiritual states or experiences, and numerous approaches to measuring or assessing it exist (Lindert et al, 2015). Well-being as a construct requires a higher-order definition, one that incapsulates physical and psychological health; having access to adequate resources (including financial and social resources/support) and incorporates spirituality where this is appropriate. It is important to consider well-being as a cross-cultural phenomenon and one that varies over time, so being both temporally relevant and sensitive. We have adopted the broad definition used by the Warwick Medical School (2019), which states that well-being represents feeling good and functioning well; experiencing positive mental and physical health, a sense of fulfilment from social relationships and the ability to function well in roles or activities. Improving well-being therefore is challenging in prison settings where people are much more likely to experience social isolation, stigmatisation, stress and mental ill health. As a result of this, there has been great emphasis placed on improving well-being of those held in prison settings. Improving well-being of people in prison was the first commitment of the National Partnership agreement between the Ministry of Justice and the NHS 2018–2021 (England) to promote health and recovery for people held in prison (HM Gov, 2018).
One of the many different approaches to improve well-being is the utilisation of human–animal interaction (HAI). The rationale behind this stems from the considerable body of literature indicating that HAI is associated with a broad spectrum of positive, biopsychosocial effects (Beetz et al., 2012), including improved well-being (Charry-Sánchez et al., 2018; Santaniello et al., 2020)....