Protecting the Public? Detention and Release of Mentally Disordered Offenders

Citation

Silverman, J. (2012), "Protecting the Public? Detention and Release of Mentally Disordered Offenders", Safer Communities, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 205-205. https://doi.org/10.1108/sc.2012.11.4.205.1

For a generation, the changing trajectory of criminal justice policy concerns has fascinated social science researchers. Why the rise in what Bottoms famously called “populist punitiveness” in the 1990s? Why the preoccupation with anti‐social behaviour when recorded crime was dropping sharply? Why the gradual dominance of measures to confront fear of crime and boost public confidence?

Now, Tessa Boyd‐Caine has addressed an equally important issue: the detention and release of mentally disordered offenders. As she observes, what is it about this particular category of offender that makes them subject to executive discretion (by the Home Secretary until 2008, now the Justice Secretary) rather than the “professionals” within both the criminal justice and mental health systems? And how does the lengthening shadow of risk and public protection shape this aspect of policy and practice?

She started her work with an advantage. As a former forensic manager for the Mental Health Review Tribunal of New South Wales, she understands the language and processes. And this background helped her gain invaluable access to officials in the Home Office Mental Health Unit and to the decision making of a review tribunal. She deploys extracts from her interviews judiciously and, given that this is an under‐researched, dare one say “restricted” area, the insights of practitioners are often more than revealing.

Never allowing detail to overwhelm or obscure some of the wider issues – such as the part played by human rights considerations and the construction of the “public” at potential risk, which tends to exaggerate the division between offender and victim – this is an astute and clear‐eyed account.

It also has the advantage of being written in an accessible style. She wanted the research to be of interest to policy‐makers and practitioners in the system as well as to academic researchers, and it undoubtedly will be. Her conclusion, that “notions of procedural fairness and human rights for restricted patients simply did not feature as prominently as those of distraught victims or vengeful communities” (p. 181) seems justified by the evidence she amasses.

If there are criticisms, it is that perhaps she does not fully acknowledge that the period of her research, 2004‐2007, saw a peculiar focus at government level on public protection because of a number of high‐profile crimes committed by mentally disordered offenders. Would the conclusions have been different had the research been conducted earlier or later? Nor does she give full weight to the role of the media in the construction of risk. And a fuller comparison with the work of the Parole Board might have illuminated the decision making of the Mental Health Review Tribunal to greater effect.

But these are relatively minor caveats. With serious incident reviews regularly throwing up concerns about “care in the community” and the decision making of psychiatrists and others, this book throws open some doors which, for too long, have been closed.