NCJ Number
110752
Date Published
1985
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This article critically examines the legal standard of dangerousness in terms of its empirical prediction, the civil liberties of prisoners and mental patients, and the therapeutic role.
Abstract
Published studies on the prediction of dangerousness have been inadequate, poorly conceived, wrongly interpreted, and well below any standard of scientific research or even clinical experience. While the legal standard of dangerousness provides a procedural basis for the deprivation of liberty, it cannot provide moral justification for preventing the liberty of the alleged mental patient who has committed no crime. In such cases, the preventive detention decision must be based on tangible empirical necessity. Psychiatrists and psychologists may help judges decide whether a patient will benefit from hospitalization, but they cannot help judges with the long-term prediction of dangerousness. The morality of law and jurisprudence is based on a theory of acts that have been committed. Nowhere is there a coherent jurisprudence of preventive detention. If there were such a jurisprudence, it would have to be based on empirical studies. Such studies do not now exist. Psychiatrists and others who appear in court and offer predictions of violence allow courts to deny they have one foot in quick sand, and in so doing they do a disservice to law and to attempts to establish psychiatry and psychology as scientific disciplines. 1 note and 6 references.