NCJ Number
224455
Journal
Punishment & Society Volume: 10 Issue: 3 Dated: July 2008 Pages: 301-317
Date Published
July 2008
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This article provides an analysis of the United Kingdom’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) program which proposes new legislation to provide civil and criminal powers for the detention of DSPD individuals as a means of managing individuals assessed with DSPD.
Abstract
In regards to the United Kingdom’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder’s (DSPD) program initiative (detention of DSPD individuals), three concluding points can be made. First, the claim that the DSPD initiative manifests a wider shift to risk-based governance is true up to a point but at the same time tells much less than it might appear to at first sight. Second, the issues of risk and dangerousness that run through the DSPD initiative raise some fundamental political and normative questions. These questions go to the heart of debates about what kinds of human beings individuals wish to be and what kind of society individuals wish to live in. Third, the type of negative view of risk previously set out by Rose (1998), while it speaks to an important point, also leans towards a less constructive tendency in the literature which links ‘risk’ into a paranoid politics in which risk appears as an ideology masking a real inability to predict. Through the analysis presented, it is hoped that a more constructive statement of how to interpret the DSPD initiative has been offered than that provided in some of the more dystopian accounts. In 1999, radical and controversial proposals were put forward by the United Kingdom government for a new approach to the management of dangerous individuals with severe personality disorders. The DSPD program involved service development and research but its most contentious part was the proposal for new legislation to provide civil and criminal powers for the detention of DSPD individuals in new specialist high-secure facilities. The view of this initiative is that risk has become the overriding driver of contemporary mental health and penal policy. References