ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the mental health services that are available to mentally disordered offenders. These services are of varying levels of security and the underlying principle is that no person should be detained in a greater level of security than is necessary. This principle may not always be applied in practice. One reason is the differential rate of progress through levels of security. Patients in high-secure services may be stabilised relatively quickly to the point of being fit to move on to services offering lower security. However, rehabilitation often takes a long time, and low-secure places do not become available at the rate required. This problem is often compounded by a lack of connection between services, so that there is no clearly planned route for a patient's movement from high-secure through to low-secure services. However, over the past decades, there have been many improvements in the provision of mental health services for offenders in prisons, in secure hospitals and in the community and these are reflected in the descriptions below.
