Product Description: Doubts about the reality of mental illness and the benefits of psychiatric treatment helped foment a revolution in the law's attitude toward mental disorders over the last 25 years. Legal reformers pushed for laws to make it more difficult to hospitalize and treat people with mental illness, and easier to punish them when they committed criminal acts...read more

Profiles the author's career as a forensic psychiatrist, recounting the many frightening criminals he has faced, including the Hillside Strangler, Juan Corona, and members of the Manson family

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Product Description: Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration...read more

Product Description: For a myriad of reasons the criminal justice system has become the de facto mental health system, with the three largest inpatient psychiatric institutions in America being jails--not hospitals. This book explores how and why this is the case...read more

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Product Description: The Evolution of Mental Health Law chronicles a relatively new field that has developed around the goals of protecting the rights and needs of people with disabilities, defining the proper sphere of individualization in criminal justice, and drawing boundaries between science and morality in decision making...read more

Based on the case of Alvin Ford, an American death row inmate, this thought-provoking book focuses on the issues raised when the criminal justice system attempts to apply the death penalty to the mentally impaired. Issues addressed include: the definition of mental illness for the purposes of exemption from execution; the evaluation of competence for execution by mental health professionals; the consequences of disagreements among health professionals about a defendant's mental status; and the fate of prisoners who are exempted. Ford's unique case leads the authors to examine more general issues such as the involvement of health professionals in modern capital sentencing, as well as the administration of the death penalty i (view table of contents)