15th EPTA Annual Conference (Barcelona, 2022)

During the last two years, the needs coming from the COVID-19 pandemic put our academies in the centre of many glances by the Prison Services. There was the need for recruiting and training, in a very short period of time, new staff for attending the extra demands provoked by the pandemic, we all changed our routines of working, introducing “online” tools as the main way to provide training, etc.

After this big effort and after putting in practice many of the lessons learned, we are convinced that the time has arrived for sharing a deep approach into our strategies and practices for assessing the work we do, as training academies, and its impact on the quality of the prison services.

This year, at the EPTA Annual Conference 27-29 June 2022 in Barcelona, the Centre for Legal Studies and Specialised Training came up with the title: ‘The need to evaluate training: a work in progress…’

Click here to view the agenda.

Click below to view the presentations in PDF format:

Day 1

• Lisanne Veldt – Project perspective: The EPTA II Project.‘Innovating together: Connecting European Penitentiary Training Academies’
• First Plenary: “Training the prison staff: the route map. The Perspective from the European Institutions: EU and CoE”
  • Lena Geckle – Policy Officer at Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers European Commission, European Union.
  • Ilina Taneva – Secretary to the Council for Penological Co-operation (PC-CP). Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law. Council of Europe.
  • Jörg Jesse – Former Director-General. Prison and Probation Administration Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, Ministry of Justice.
• Second Plenary “A global approach to training models”
  • Marijke van Veen and Leo Tigges – Netherlands Helsinki Committee. A Prison Capacity Building Model; implications for training.
  • Laurent Gras – ENAP-France, The evaluation of penitentiary training: the floor is up to the students.
  • Ole Stageberg – KRUS-Norway. “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience”.

Day 2

• Third Plenary: “Examples of inspiring practices”
  • Florus Mulder – SCCPS-Switzerland. The Swiss approach for transferring of knowledge and skills into practice.
  • Vincenzo Abbondante and Cristina Dimitri – Penitentiary Academy – Italy. Italian penitentiary training system: strengths and weaknesses.
  • Elena Losada – CEJFE. Catalonia – Communities of Knowledge.
  • Vasile Scutaru and Elena Gratiela Mindru – National Correctional Officers Training School Târgu Ocna – Romania. Evaluation of the initial training process provided to the penitentiary policemen by National Correctional Officers Training School Târgu Ocna.
  • Natx Jambrina and Manel Capdevila – CEJFE. Catalonia. Projects with Values (PROVA)

Day 3

• Fourth Plenary: “Ethics of Training”
  • Dra. Begoña Román Maestre. Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona.
• John Flavin –  Irish Prison Service College, EPTA SC, Statutes Changes.

Marijke van Veen and Leo Tigges – Netherlands Helsinki Committee. A Prison Capacity Building Model; implications for training: