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Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration. But this explanation does not justify why our society has chosen to treat these people with punitive measures. In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences among the goals, ethos, and actions of the legal and health care systems. Drawing on high-profile cases, the authors provide a critical analysis of topics, including legal standards for competency, insanity versus mental illness, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed juveniles, the injury and death rates of mentally ill prisoners due to the inappropriate use of force, the high level of suicide, and the release of mentally ill individuals from jails and prisons who have received little or no treatment.
Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration. But this explanation does not justify why our society has chosen to treat these people with punitive measures. In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences among the goals, ethos, and actions of the legal and health care systems. Drawing on high-profile cases, the authors provide a critical analysis of topics, including legal standards for competency, insanity versus mental illness, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed juveniles, the injury and death rates of mentally ill prisoners due to the inappropriate use of force, the high level of suicide, and the release of mentally ill individuals from jails and prisons who have received little or no treatment.
How might we best manage those who have offended but have mental vulnerabilities? How are risks identified, managed and minimised? What are ideological differences of care and control, punishment and therapy negotiated in practice? These questions are just some which are debated in the eleven chapters of this book. Each with their focus on a given area, authors raise the challenges, controversies, dilemmas and concerns attached to this particular context of delivering justice. Taking insights on imprisonment, community punishments and forensic services, this book provides a broad analysis of environments. But it also casts a critical light on how punishment of the mentally vulnerable sits within public attitudes and ideas, policy discourses, and the ways in which those seen to present as risky and dangerous are imagined. Written in a clear and direct style, this book serves as a valuable resource for those studying, working or researching at the intersections of healthcare and criminal justice domains. This book is essential reading for students and practitioners within the fields of criminology and criminal justice, social work, forensic psychology, forensic psychiatry, mental health nursing and probation.
“A haunting and harrowing indictment . . . [a] significant achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist * New York Times Book Review Paperback Row * Time Best New Books July 2020 Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American jails and prisons. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones. Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. This expertise—the mind in crisis—has enabled her to reckon with the human stories behind mass incarceration. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.
Contributors to this volume present and discuss new data which suggest that major mental disorder substantially increases the risk of violent crime. These findings come at a crucial time, since those who suffer from mental disorders are increasingly living in the community, rather than in institutions. The book describes the magnitude and complexity of the problem and offers hope that humane, effective intervention can prevent violent crime being committed by the seriously mentally disordered.
A powerful, sophisticated, and original critique on how the disciplines of law and psychiatry behave and on how the mental health and justice systems operate, Punishing the Mentally Ill reveals where, how, and why the identity and humanity of persons with psychiatric disorders are consciously and unconsciously denied. Author Bruce A. Arrigo contends that despite periodic and well-intentioned efforts at reform, the current law-psychiatry system functions to punish the mentally ill for being different. The book synthesizes a wide range of mainstream and critical literature in sociology, law, philosophy, history, psychology, and psychoanalysis to establish a new theory of punishment at the law-psychiatry divide. To situate the analysis, enduring psycholegal issues are explored including the meaning of mental illness, definitions and predictions of dangerousness, the ethics of advocacy, the right to community-based treatment, the logic of forensic courtroom verdicts, transcarceration, and the execution of mentally disordered offenders among others. Punishing the Mentally Ill shows that current mental disability law research, programming, and policy are seriously flawed and that wholesale reform is necessary if the goals of citizen justice, social well-being, and humanism are to be realized.
There is no question that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving defendants with mental disabilities. There is clear, systemic bias at all stages of the prosecution and the sentencing process – in determining who is competent to be executed, in the assessment of mitigation evidence, in the ways that counsel is assigned, in the ways that jury determinations are often contaminated by stereotyped preconceptions of persons with mental disabilities, in the ways that cynical expert testimony reflects a propensity on the part of some experts to purposely distort their testimony in order to achieve desired ends. These questions are shockingly ignored at all levels of the criminal justice system, and by society in general. Here, Michael Perlin explores the relationship between mental disabilities and the death penalty and explains why and how this state of affairs has come to be, to explore why it is necessary to identify the factors that have contributed to this scandalous and shameful policy morass, to highlight the series of policy choices that need immediate remediation, and to offer some suggestions that might meaningfully ameliorate the situation. Using real cases to illustrate the ways in which the persons with mental disabilities are unable to receive fair treatment during death penalty trials, he demonstrates the depth of the problem and the way it’s been institutionalized so as to be an accepted part of our system. He calls for a new approach, and greater attention to the issues that have gone overlooked for so long.
The focus of this book is on the government of prisoners with mental health problems in England and Wales over the last twenty-five years. The wider context and backdrop to the book is the shift to 'late modernity', which, since the 1970s has seen massive structural change in most Western societies, affecting the social, economic and cultural spheres, as well as the field of crime and punishment. This book investigates whether these profound transformations have also led to a reconfiguring of responses to mentally vulnerable offenders who end up in prison. Specifically, it explores how this group of prisoners has come to be viewed increasingly as sources of 'risk', requiring 'management' or containment, rather than as people suitable for therapeutic responses. The book draws on primary research carried out by the author, including interviews with key informants involved in the field during this period, such as former cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, campaigners and academics. In conducting this investigation, the author has developed a method of research which combines and synthesizes different forms of analysis to create a novel approach to socio-historical research.
An urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.
Today, we know that crime is often not just a matter of making bad decisions. Rather, there are a variety of factors that are implicated in much criminal offending, some fairly obvious like poverty, mental illness, and drug abuse and others less so, such as neurocognitive problems. Today, we have the tools for effective criminal behavioral change, but this cannot be an excuse for criminal offending. In The Future of Crime and Punishment, William R. Kelly identifies the need to educate the public on how these tools can be used to most effectively and cost efficiently reduce crime, recidivism, victimization and cost. The justice system of the future needs to be much more collaborative, utilizing the expertise of a variety of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, addiction, and neuroscience. Judges and prosecutors are lawyers, not clinicians, and as we transition the justice system to a focus on behavioral change, the decision making will need to reflect the input of clinical experts. The path forward is one characterized largely by change from traditional criminal prosecution and punishment to venues that balance accountability, compliance, and risk management with behavioral change interventions that address the primary underlying causes for recidivism. There are many moving parts to this effort and it is a complex proposition. It requires substantial changes to law, procedure, decision making, roles and responsibilities, expertise, and funding. Moreover, it requires a radical shift in how we think about crime and punishment. Our thinking needs to reflect a perspective that crime is harmful, but that much criminal behavior is changeable.