ABSTRACT
The concept of morality seems never far from the surface in the management of dangerous people by criminal justice agencies. For example, the moral questions raised by accounts of offending have led to an understanding of psychopathy that proposes the syndrome to be a disorder of moral development. The ethical justification of incarceration on the basis of personality disorder goes something like this. For the psychopathic individual, offences or adverse incidents are the manifest pathology, and constitute harm to the individual. Control of psychopathic behaviour in a custodial environment thus prevents a deterioration of the psychopathic condition, and can be conceived as a form of treatment, beneficial to the individual. From a psychodynamic perspective, one of the understandings of psychosis is that the mind is overly porous; that the delusional beliefs and hallucinatory experiences of the psychotic are the daydreams and internal conversations of the non-psychotic.
