Your Old Road Is/ Rapidly Agin\u27 : International Human Rights Standards and Their Impact on Forensic Psychologists, the Practice of Forensic Psychology, and the Conditions of Institutionalization of Persons with Mental Disabilities

For years, considerations of the relationship between international human rights standards and the work of forensic psychologists have focused on the role of organized psychology in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghirab. That issue has been widely discussed and debated, and these discussions show no sign of abating. But there has been virtually no attention given to another issue of international human rights, one that grows in importance each year: how the treatment (especially, the institutional treatment) of persons with mental and intellectual disabilities violates international human rights law, and the silence of organized forensic psychology in the face of this mistreatment. This issue has become even more pointed in recent years, following the ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Organized forensic psychology has remained largely silent about the potential significance of this Convention and about how it demands that we rethink the way we institutionalize persons – often in brutal and barbaric conditions – around the world. In many parts of the world, circumstances are bleak: services are provided in segregated settings that cut people off from society, often for life; persons are arbitrarily detained from society and committed to institutions without any modicum of due process; individuals are denied the ability to make choices about their lives when they are put under plenary guardianship; there is a wide-spread denial of appropriate medical care or basic hygiene in psychiatric facilities, individuals are subject to powerful and often-dangerous psychotropic medications without adequate standards, and there is virtually no human rights oversight and enforcement mechanisms to protect against the broad range of institutional abuse. Although there is a robust literature developing – interestingly, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, but little in the US – about how such institutional conditions violate the international human rights of this population, virtually nothing has been written about howorganized forensic psychology has been silent about these abuses. In this paper, I (1) discuss the relevant international human rights law that applies to these questions, (2) examine the current state of conditions in institutions worldwide, (3) argue why forensic psychology needs to become more aggressively involved in this area, and (4) offer some suggestions as to how this situation can be ameliorated

For the Misdemeanor Outlaw: The Impact of the ADA on the Institutionalization of Criminal Defendants with Mental Disabilities

This article argues that the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Olmstead v. L.C., 119 S. Ct. 2176 (1999), finding a qualified right to community treatment and services for certain institutionalized persons under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), causes us to reconceptualize state policies that mandate that all defendants in four categories - those being evaluated for competency to stand trial, those found permanently incompetent to stand trial under the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Jackson v. Indiana, 406 U.S. 715 (1972), those being evaluated for insanity, and those found not guilty by reason of insanity - be treated and housed in the state\u27s maximum security forensic facility. It concludes that such across-the-board policies that fail to take into account the severity of the crime with which the defendant is charged, the degree of his current dangerousness, and the severity of his mental illness violate the ADA under the terms of the Olmstead decision

Through the Wild Cathedral Evening: Barriers, Attitudes, Participatory Democracy, Professor TenBroek, and the Rights of Persons with Mental Disabilities

This article is a commentary on Michael Ashley Stein & Janet Lord, Jacobus TenBroek, Participatory Justice, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, - Tex. J. Civ Lib. & Civ. Rts. - (2008) (in press). In it, I seek to expand their analysis of the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in an effort to invigorate an area of institutionalized patients rights law that is now nearly forgotten: the rights of such persons to exercise civil rights while institutionalized. I also argue that Prof. Stein and Ms. Lord\u27s paper should lead us to focus also on the issues of attitudes, and how authentic amelioration and law reform in this area is impossible unless and until we begin to consider how negative and stereotypical attitudes towards persons with mental disabilities are formed and perpetuated. I conclude that the demand for participatory justice for persons with disabilities cannot be satisfied unless and until we turn our attention to attitudinal issues

Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Understanding the Sanist and Pretextual Bases of Mental Disability Law

Symposium: Therapeutic Jurisprudence: From Idea to Applicatio