Mentally disordered offenders: A national survey of patients and facilities.

Abstract

Persons believed both to be mentally ill and to have committed criminal behaviormentally disordered offenders' are enmeshed in a Byzantine pattern of relationships between mental health and correctional agencies, such that they often receive the worst that both systems have to offer (Kittrie, 1971; Wexler, 1976). As well, they confront forensic psychiatry and psychology with ethical dilemmas that defy easy resolution (Roth, 1980) and with demands for levels of predictive accuracy and treatment efficacy that appear to exceed the state of the mental health sciences in the present or foreseeable future (Steadman, 1980; Monahan, 1981). A confluence of several factors has served to highlight the salience of mentally disordered offenders to mental health and criminal justice agencies in recent years.