Disavowing 'the' prison

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation

5 Remote method invocation (RMI

This article gives a U.K.-based perspective on the involvement of forensic psychiatry organizations in questions of political controversy. Medical professional bodies are fundamentally concerned to uphold good standards of clinical practice and patient welfare, and to uphold professional medical ethics. In our specialty, when acting as individual expert witnesses, we seek to serve the courts with objectivity and respect for the law. However, as members of our professional bodies we have a legitimate medical concern about how the law affects the mentally disordered as a class. We should articulate a collective view about what treating the mentally disordered justly and appropriately in the legal system means and should challenge the law when it fails to achieve this

Cross-cultural clinical judgment bias in personality disorder diagnosis by forensic psychiatrists in the UK: A case-vignette study

Previous research in the UK has suggested that cross-cultural bias in personality disorder diagnosis might partly account for the smaller proportion of Black, relative to White, patients with personality disorder in secure psychiatric hospitals. Using the case-vignette method, we investigated cross-cultural clinical judgment bias in the diagnosis of personality disorder in African Caribbean men by 220 forensic psychiatrists in the UK. In the vignette describing possible DSM-IV antisocial personality disorder, Caucasians were 2.8 times more likely to be given a diagnosis of personality disorder than African Caribbeans. Diagnosis also varied according to the ethnicity of the clinicians. No cross-cultural bias was found in the vignette describing possible DSM-IV borderline personality disorder. These findings are important in relation to recent policies for offenders and others with personality disorder, and to the current focus on delivering race equality in mental health services in the UK. Ongoing debates about the strengths and limitations of the case-vignette method are also discussed. © 2007 The Guilford Press

How Cogenerative Dialogues in Partnership Mentoring Project Drive Mentees’ Teaching Change?

The purpose of this paper is to provide some reflections on time in relation to imprisonment. These arise from three interview based studies we have been carrying out involving distinctly different groups of ex-prisoners. We are focused particularly on the phenomena of post-release experience, and their implications for the ways in which we think about imprisonment effects. If a more accurate view of long-term imprisonment is that it permanently alters the life courses of those involved, removes part of their expected life history and causes harms beyond sentence, then we need not only to rethink how we assist released prisoners, but, more fundamentally, we need to rethink our ideas of prison as punishment.