NCJ Number
110608
Date Published
1986
Length
40 pages
Annotation
This review presents information designed to enable psychiatrists working in correctional settings with the special information needed to maintain professional skills, interest, and empathy for prisoners rather than leave the institutional setting in depression and anger.
Abstract
In the past, correctional psychiatry has generally been neither effective nor well received. However, more services are needed if any success is to be achieved in the penal system. In addition, correctional psychiatry cannot serve both the penal bureaucracy and its own traditional therapeutic aims. Moreover, an effective program of correctional psychiatry will be impossible until both psychiatrists and correctional administrators recognize that the majority of both violent and nonviolent inmates are not mentally ill. An effective and useful prison psychiatry must also be committed firmly and be knowledgeable about the special aspects of health services delivery in a prison. It must be oriented to the inmate rather than to society in its goals. Finally, it must consciously avoid preoccupation with whether inmates recidivate, either due to the direct effects of the psychiatrist or in agreement with the psychiatrist's predictions. The main purpose of correctional psychiatry is to make available to inmates on a voluntary basis those medical and psychological opportunities that should be available in the outside community. Treatment should be addressed to the mental or behavioral disorder as defined by the inmate, and release should generally not depend on the psychiatrist's estimate of cure. 184 references and discussions of the history of correctional psychiatry, of types of mental disorders in inmates, and of traditional views regarding correctional psychiatry.