IF YOU鈥橰E going to try to reform society鈥檚 most dangerous members, do it properly. That鈥檚 the message from a new review of the , run over the past decade in two jails and two secure hospitals in England.
The progamme was launched by the UK Ministry of Justice following a vicious 1996 crime. A man diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder attacked a woman and her two daughters with a hammer, killing two and leaving the surviving child with severe head injuries.
Under the programme, some 450 men considered to have a 鈥渄angerous and severe鈥� personality disorder, or DSPD, have received intensive cognitive-behavioural therapy.
Advertisement
But after 10 years and despite a budget of around 拢200 million, there is scant evidence of its effectiveness, says a group of psychiatrists and psychologists in a paper to appear in .
Lead author of Imperial College London says there were problems from the start. Not only was there no established clinical diagnosis of DSPD, but each centre followed a different pattern of treatment, and the authorities did not allow offenders to be randomly sent to different centres. This made it impossible to determine whether any differences in outcomes were due to the different treatment patterns or other factors.
鈥淭here was no established clinical diagnosis of dangerous and severe personality disorder鈥�
What鈥檚 more, many offenders seem to have been enrolled into lengthy treatment as they neared the end of their sentences. Tyrer and his colleagues fear that the programme has sometimes been used simply to keep dangerous people off the streets, rather than to improve people鈥檚 mental health.
The declined to comment on the paper, but says that a full evaluation of the programme is under way.
