Samantha Weston – författare

This book explores the controversial relationship between mental health and offending and looks at the ways in which offenders with mental health problems are cared for, coerced and controlled by the criminal justice and mental health systems. It provides a much-needed criminological approach to the field of forensic mental health.

Beginning with an exploration into why the relationship between mental health and offending is so complex, readers will be introduced to a range of perspectives through which mental health and its relationship to offending behaviour can be understood. The book considers the politics surrounding mental health and offending, focusing particularly on the changing policy response to mentally disordered offenders since the mid-1990s. With dedicated chapters concerning the police, courts, secure services and the community, this book explores a range of issues including:

• The tensions between the care, coercion and control of mentally disordered offenders

• The increasingly blurred boundaries between mental health and criminal justice

• Rights, responsibilities, accountability and blame

• Risk, public protection and precaution

• Challenges involved with treatment, recovery and rehabilitation

• Staffing challenges surrounding multi-agency working

• Funding, privatisation and challenges surrounding service commissioning

• Methodological challenges in the field.

Providing an accessible and concise overview of the field and its key perspectives, this book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in mental health offered by criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work, nursing and public policy departments. It will also be of interest to a wide range of mental health and criminal justice practitioners.

This book explores the controversial relationship between mental health and offending and looks at the ways in which offenders with mental health problems are cared for, coerced and controlled by the criminal justice and mental health systems. It provides a much-needed criminological approach to the field of forensic mental health.

Beginning with an exploration into why the relationship between mental health and offending is so complex, readers will be introduced to a range of perspectives through which mental health and its relationship to offending behaviour can be understood. The book considers the politics surrounding mental health and offending, focusing particularly on the changing policy response to mentally disordered offenders since the mid-1990s. With dedicated chapters concerning the police, courts, secure services and the community, this book explores a range of issues including:

• The tensions between the care, coercion and control of mentally disordered offenders

• The increasingly blurred boundaries between mental health and criminal justice

• Rights, responsibilities, accountability and blame

• Risk, public protection and precaution

• Challenges involved with treatment, recovery and rehabilitation

• Staffing challenges surrounding multi-agency working

• Funding, privatisation and challenges surrounding service commissioning

• Methodological challenges in the field.

Providing an accessible and concise overview of the field and its key perspectives, this book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in mental health offered by criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work, nursing and public policy departments. It will also be of interest to a wide range of mental health and criminal justice practitioners.

Mental Health, Crime and Justice brings together original and state of the art contributions from theoretical, empirical, and policy-related scholarship concerned with the ways people with mental health illnesses are understood, ‘managed’, ‘controlled’ and responded to. Drawing on critical scholarship from a variety of disciplines, the collection pays careful attention to the controversial relationship between mental health and crime, as well as key issues relating to justice and social harm. It presents a synthesis of discipline-specific approaches, from law, psychiatry, sociology, and criminology, but will also bridge together developments in both theory and practice.

The book explores the relationship between mental health and crime by deconstructing and analysing two important facets of the justice system: (1) the various ways in which people with mental disorder navigate and are navigated through the criminal justice (and forensic mental health) system(s); and (2) how so called ‘problematised populations’ are governed, with a particular emphasis on mental health as an unfolding dimension of social harm.

Unique to this volume, well-rehearsed debates are cross-examined with contemporary critiques about social harm and justice. By considering the multifaceted dimensions of violence to include ‘gendered’, ‘structural’, and ‘systemic’, this book provides a nuanced insight that exposes the controversial relationship that is said to exist between mental health and crime. The collection seeks to highlight the harm and injustice that people with mental health disorders are subject to when interacting with the criminal justice system.