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3 books match the query 'Mentally ill offenders'
Homicidal Insanity, 1800-1985
Janet Colaizzi, with a foreword by Jonas R. Rappeport
University of Alabama Press, 1989
Where madness meets the law, history leaves no easy verdict.
Homicidal insanity has remained a vexation to both the psychiatric and legal professions despite the panorama of scientific and social change during the past 200 years. The predominant opinion today among psychiatrists is that no correlation exists between dangerousness and specific mental disorders. But for generation after generation, psychiatrists have reported cases of insane homicide that were clinically similar. Although psychiatric theory changed and psychiatric nosology was inconsistent, the mental phenomena psychiatrists identified in such cases remained the same. The central thesis of Homicidal Insanity is that as psychiatric theory changed, psychiatrists regarded these phenomena variously as symptoms of mental disease or the disease in itself. It is possible to trace these phenomena throughout the history of Anglo-American psychiatric theory and practice. A secondary thesis of the book is that psychiatrists have used these phenomena as predictors and markers in the practical matters of preventing insane homicide and of testifying in the courts to defend the irresponsible and expose the culpable.
For 200 years, scientific and philosophical disagreement raised controversy and brought the issues to public attention. Still, to this day no rational method exists to discriminate the dangerous from the harmless in matters of involuntary commitment, nor insanity from crime in the courts.
The Criminally Insane
A Community Follow-up of Mentally Ill OffendersTerence Thornberry and Joseph E. Jacoby
University of Chicago Press, 1979
In 1971, 586 patients were released from a Pennsylvania maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. They were not considered officially "cured," but a federal court held that their commitments had been unconstitutional. Through exhaustive examination of hospital and police records and interviews with hospital administrators and the subjects themselves, Thornberry and Jacoby assess the processes by which the patients had been retained in confinement, the impact of their release upon their communities, and their ability to adjust to the freedom of community life.
The authors demonstrate that the patients did not display a significant level of violent behavior during confinement, nor did they pose a major threat to society after release. In fact, their social and psychological adjustment to community life is shown to have been comparable to that of non-criminal mental patients. Yet despite these findings the subjects had been retained in maximum-security confinement for an average of fourteen years because they were predicted to be violent and "dangerous" to society. The authors explain this inaccuracy by a process called "political prediction," in which clinicians avoid any potential risks to the community, the reputation of their hospitals, and their careers by consistently overpredicting dangerous behavior.
The Criminally Insane will stimulate response from professionals in a wide variety of fields, including law, criminology, psychiatry, and sociology, and from anyone concerned with society's responsibility to the mentally ill offender.
Violence and Mental Disorder
Developments in Risk AssessmentEdited by John Monahan and Henry J. Steadman
University of Chicago Press, 1994
"Essential for all those who are interested in the study of risk assessment of violence. It is particularly important for the researcher in this area. . . . For the clinician who must make violence assessments it is important reading as well."—Stewart Levine, Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law