Mentally Disordered Offenders

In addition to women and young offenders, another special and oft-considered separate group are those offenders who suffer from mental disorders. ¹ While the mentally ill have, for centuries, been perceived to be dangerous (see Chapter 1), ‘most mentally disordered offenders are neither seriously ill nor dangerous’ (Burney and Pearson 1995: 292), despite the fact they are often perceived to be ‘an unquantifiable danger’ (Peay 2007: 497). It is therefore difficult to ascertain whether such offenders should be contained within the penal system or within a more welfare-orientated mental health system, even though current policy regarding mental health and crime is largely dominated by notions of risk rather than by humanitarian concerns (Peay 2007). The presence of mental and personality disorders in those who commit serious sexual and violent offences is not a recent discovery, although, interestingly, depression is thought to be associated with higher rates of violence than actual schizophrenia (Easton and Piper 2008). Despite this knowledge, a number of high-profile crimes committed by mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) have brought them to the forefront of the political agenda, and so it is perhaps to be expected that separate policies and risk-management strategies exist to deal with this collection of offenders. Whether this is the case and whether such policies and strategies work is the subject matter of this chapter. In particular, it looks at the prevalence of MDOs, how they are dealt with by the courts, what assessment tools are used to determine their levels of risk, how and where they are detained, and what is in place in terms of risk-management and risk-reduction strategies.