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8 www.donegaltoday.com Thursday, November 21, 2013Donegal Democrat
“Human salvage” in action
A leading Canadian research-er into cognitive links to crime prevention has been visiting a pioneering road safety pro-gramme in Donegal this week.Clinical sociologist and crim-inologist, Jim Hilborn, has over 30 years professional ex-perience as a counsellor, pro-gramme developer, evaluator and trainer in the criminal justice system in Canada. He is now based in Esto-nia where he works promoting evidence-informed policy and evidence-based prac-tice in the Baltic Re-gion of Europe.
This was his first visit to the Letterkenny based “Pro-Social Drivers Programme”.
The programme, which is run by Gary Doggett, is aimed at offering an education pro-gramme based around driver behaviour and often works in conjunction with the court
Jim Hilborn
HarmreductionGet on with life.Jim says by helping those gain an insight into their decision mak-ing it can help keep them on the right track and out of prison. “I’d like to keep them out of prison and hopefully they will learn and get on with life. Have a good life an maybe have the occasional drink,” he says. He says such programmes can help deliver a reduction in harm and “promote competency”.
“If you put someone in jail, they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is learning how to be a human being, becoming an adult, getting involved with work and life. They are caged. It’s like a refrigerator. Sure, we keep them nice and fresh, and most of the time they don’t get killed, but they are not doing the learning they need to do. Then they come out and have to pick up the pieces,” he says.
system to offer courses to help address road and motor-ing behaviour with driving of-fenders.
Jim describes his work as “human salvage”, as his main objective is to help develop educational programmes that help offenders, or potential of-fenders, to gain an insight in-to their decision making and actions with the view to mak-ing better choices that are less harmful to them and others.
“The background of my in-volvement is that Gary was try-ing to develop this programme and came across the work of
Robert Ross, who developed the first Cog-nitive behav-ioural Therapy programme for offenders. I’ve
been working with Bob since the mid-1980’s and have been working in this area that I call human salvage, in the criminal justice system,” Jim explains.
He said the main goal of this work is to stop man po-tential offenders from ”wast-ing part of their life” in prison.
The goal is to stop offenders from wasting
part of their life
Eamonn [email protected]: @EamonnMcFadden
Canadian criminologist travels to advise on innovative drivers programmeA special coffee morning to raise funds for those stricken by the Philip-pines typhoon disaster will take place Maggie’s Tavern, St Johnston this Saturday, November 23.It is part of a series of events aimed at raising funds that Fr Oliver Mc-Crossan, who is from St Johnston but who works in the Philippines, can bring to the country when he returns next week.Organisers of the events say Fr McCrossan will be in attendance and is re-turning to Philippines on November 27 with what ever money is raised and will ensure it is put it to good use.There will also be a pool competition from 2pm on Sunday for a farm-fed Christmas turkey spon-sored by Neil Sweeney.A raffle is also taking place, tickets available at Mag-gies and the draw will be on Sunday night with a dance and entertainment by Jennifer.
Philippines fundraising events in St Johnston
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