Am J Psychiatry 1988; 145:605-610
Copyright © 1988 by American Psychiatric Association
Psychiatry and the criminal justice system: testing the myths
MR Phillips, AS Wolf and DJ Coons
Alaska Psychiatric Institute, Anchorage.
Several states are changing legislation and treatment programs for mentally
ill offenders without knowing how current laws and programs operate. To
address this problem the authors linked data from police records, court
reports, and clinical files for 2,735 psychiatric referrals from the
criminal justice system of Alaska from 1977 through 1981. They found that
only 0.2%-2.0% of all schizophrenic persons in the community were arrested
for violent crimes each year, accounting for 1.1%-2.3% of all arrests for
violent crimes; that psychiatrists agreed about competency and
responsibility in 79% of the cases evaluated by more than one clinician;
and that a successful insanity defense occurred in 0.1% or less of all
criminal cases.
