Background: Research has shown that staff-patient relationships within secure forensic services appear to be influenced by an ethos of institutional control, most evident in the tensions of developing meaningful therapeutic relationships while continuing to maintain high levels of security. In an attempt to address the perceived deficits in these relationships, the development of a positive therapeutic milieu was proposed within a high security hospital. Novel therapeutic interventions, known as Ward-Talking-Groups (WTGs), were introduced as a first step towards the development of this milieu. It was also recognised that research exploring the efficacy of psychological interventions for the treatment of psychotic symptoms have exclusively focused on community based settings or general psychiatric hospitals. Although the findings from these reviews have some utility within a forensic psychiatric population, this population also have a number of co-occurring complex needs that inevitably impact on treatment outcomes. Objective: The primary study aimed to explore in detail patients' experiences of being part of their WTGs. A systematic review was also conducted to review the existing literature regarding the efficacy of psychological interventions for the treatment of psychotic symptoms in individuals with forensic needs. Methods: For the primary study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten male participants detained within a high security hospital. The data was transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. For the systematic review, using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, eight databases were searched, selected journals were hand searched and two grey literature databases were searched to identify relevant studies. 9 Results: For the primary study, three themes emerged from the data: Coming together as a unit; Liberty Vs. Control, and Facing something new. For the systematic review, eight studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria for review, with relevant information from each study being extracted and tabulated. The identified studies were scored against quality criteria. Discussion: For the primary study, the findings highlight the importance of patients being able relate to other people within their WTG, with the challenges and benefits of this being at the forefront of participants' minds. Participants described an increased sense of liberty within their WTG, while being acutely aware this was within the context of a high security hospital. Participants' feelings towards the introduction of their WTG appeared to be split; some felt ambivalence towards them, while others were open-minded about them. Reflecting on the introduction of their WTGs, participants shared the view that more information about them was necessary. However, they differed in their approach to seeking this out. For the systematic review, overall findings from the review papers tentatively suggest there is some evidence for the efficacy of psychological interventions in the treatment of psychotic symptoms in individuals with forensic needs. Clinical implications, strengths and limitations, and future research possibilities are outlined for both the empirical study and systematic review.

This study examined the application of conflict resolution programs in three high security organizations. In contrast to most civilian institutions high security organizations such as the Canadian Forces, are characterized by strong organizational cultures, with firmly embedded behavioural repertoires designed to manage complex, tightly coupled, functions in situations of imminent danger. Conflict resolution as practiced by the Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) program in the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces (DND/CF) has proven successful in many civilian settings, however no significant literature examines its effectiveness in a military environment. To determine how institutionalizing this function in non-military cultures affected their operations, this study compared those results with the introduction of conflict resolution in the Office of the Veterans Ombudsman, and the Office of the Correctional Investigator. The DND/CF conflict management program demonstrated that parties were highly satisfied with the overall outcome of mediation, its fairness and the amount of control they exercised over the outcome. The DGADR conflict management program demonstrated successful outcomes, were clearly accepted and strongly endorsed by participants, and is likely to engender ongoing support for organizational mandate and objectives. Both the Office of the Correctional Investigator and the Office of the Veterans Ombudsman continue to realize acceptance of many of their recommendations, have established a history of successfully resolved investigations and have developed the strategic priorities that guide their current operations. All three case study organizations encountered normative embeddedness, which tended to resist efforts to introduce new information and adjust behavioural repertoires. Resistance to change and the forces of institutionalization appeared with challenges to the legitimacy and credibility of these new approaches. Leaders in all three case study settings had to remain vigilant in protecting their mandate against erosion or constraint, and in the absence of legitimacy clearly defined by statutory authority they had to rely on the active support of senior leaders. The data generated by this study also identified limitations related to the impact of mediation outcomes and skills training on participants’ future behaviour, as well as the application of organizational justice beyond the conflict management program to investigations conducted in ombudsman settings. The results of this study indicate that it is possible to integrate conflict resolution into high security organizations, and that organizational justice constructs can accurately describe and serve as the basis for measuring the intervention process and related outcomes. Developing the required framework and conducting the corresponding summative evaluation would provide substantial insight into the application of conflict resolution in high security organizations and would in turn greatly assist the application in these and other potential settings. This research approach has the potential to serve as a model in a broader range of settings such as provincial and organizational ombudsman offices, police and fire departments and emergency health organizations. / Graduate / 0617 / njdolan@uvic.ca

The theme of my dissertation is to create the architecture of socially excluded - Higher security prison in Brno. The object uses the areal of brownfield. The building is designed as a round hall strung with the volumes of different functions. The construction system is formed with using a concrete wall in the ground floor and the 1st floor, in the living towers supporting elements - columns of reinforced concrete. Housing is divided into two with sliding half floor. Color solution is mostly gray.

The master's thesis was worked out as the arhitectural study high security prison in Brno based on the submission. High security prison for 350 prisoners responds to the needs and trends of the modern jail. The new facility is based on the principle of space saving typological solutions with minimal attendance distance. The concept is divided into two main accommodation horseshoe-shaped objects that are associated with building, that are connected operating and administrative functions. Single floor for accommodation with two housing units, which include walking terraces. Terraces are sheathed with net freely crossing the connecting object and comprehensive area of all objects. It fulfills the function of the second security. In the middle of the complex there is a sports area. Production hall with facilities closed the back of a solid fence of area. By creating a compact self-functioning complex is achieved simplicity and closeness of the prison with economic use of the land.

With industry expectations of billions of Internet-connected things, commonly referred to as the IoT, we see a growing demand for high-performance on-chip bus architectures with the following attributes: small scale, low energy, high security, and highly configurable structures for integration, verification, and performance estimation. Our research thus mainly focuses on addressing these key problems and finding the balance among all these requirements that often work against each other. First of all, we proposed a low-cost and low-power System-on-Chips (SoCs) architecture (IBUS) that can frame data transfers differently. The IBUS protocol provides two novel transfer modes – the block and state modes, and is also backward compatible with the conventional linear mode. In order to evaluate the bus performance automatically and accurately, we also proposed an evaluation methodology based on the standard circuit design flow. Experimental results show that the IBUS based design uses the least hardware resource and reduces energy consumption to a half of an AMBA Advanced High-Performance Bus (AHB) and Advanced eXensible Interface (AXI). Additionally, the valid bandwidth of the IBUS based design is 2.3 and 1.6 times, respectively, compared with the AHB and AXI based implementations. As IoT advances, privacy and security issues become top tier concerns in addition to the high performance requirement of embedded chips. To leverage limited resources for tiny size chips and overhead cost for complex security mechanisms, we further proposed an advanced IBUS architecture to provide a structural support for the block-based AES algorithm. Our results show that the IBUS based AES-encrypted design costs less in terms of hardware resource and dynamic energy (60.2%), and achieves higher throughput (x1.6) compared with AXI. Effectively dealing with the automation in design and verification for mixed-signal integrated circuits is a critical problem, particularly when the bus architecture is new. Therefore, we further proposed a configurable and synthesizable IBUS design methodology. The flexible structure, together with bus wrappers, direct memory access (DMA), AES engine, memory controller, several mixed-signal verification intellectual properties (VIPs), and bus performance models (BPMs), forms the basic for integrated circuit design, allowing engineers to integrate application-specific modules and other peripherals to create complex SoCs.