Mad or Bad?—the Enduring Dilemma

Psychiatry, Stigma and Courts

“…He put forward the proposal that there was an inverse relationship between the number of mental health hospital beds and the number of people in prison (i.e., the fewer mental health beds the higher the proportion of people in prisons and vice versa). This finding has been found to be quite robust and an Australian study by Biles and Mulligan (1973) confirmed this finding for the Australian prison population. They found two correlations to be significant, the first being that the amount of reported crime was related to the number of police, and the second an inverse relationship between mental hospital accommodation and imprisonment rates.…”

Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common‐Law Democracies, 1955–1985

“…Support for low-income housing is an obvious candidate, but these programs come in so many different forms-capital outlays for public housing, subsidies for private-sector redevelopment, and subsidies to needy individuals-that it has proven impossible to gather consistent data. Another is the portion of disability and health care spending that goes toward the treatment and maintenance of drug and alcohol abusers and the mentally ill. For lack of any other support, members of these groups often wind up in jails and prisons in the United States, and perhaps in other countries as well (Adler 1986;Belcher 1988;Biles and Mulligan 1973;Chafetz, Goldman, and Taube 1983); but published sources do not allow such expenditures to be disaggregated from the much larger categories of pension and medical benefits. Political domination.-It will also be important examine the political processes that are antecedent to policy commitments.…”

The Penrose hypothesis in 2004: Patient and prisoner numbers are positively correlated in low‐and‐middle income countries but are unrelated in high‐income countries

“…Most of these studies found that a fall in available psychiatric hospital beds occurred over the same time frame as a rise in prisoner numbers. This observation was made in Australian states in 1968 (Biles & Mulligan, 1973), in the United States of America over several periods between 1924 and 1996 (Palermo, Smith, & Liska, 1991; Raphael, 2000; Steadman, Monahan, Duffee, Hartstone, & Robbins, 1984), in the United Kingdom between 1982 and 1997 (Gunn, 2000), in England, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden between 1990 and 2002 (Priebe et al , 2005) and most recently in Ireland between 1963 and 2003 (Kelly, 2007).…”

“…Most of the authors of most of these studies concluded that the decline in psychiatric hospital populations was a cause of increased prison populations (Biles & Mulligan, 1973; Kelly, 2007; Palermo et al , 1991; Raphael, 2000). They suggest the same people who may have been hospitalized at one time were later imprisoned.…”