Forensic patients' accounts of risk: The case for qualitative research within a sociocultural theory framework

Abstract

In the literature on risk and offender rehabilitation, forensic patients' accounts of their past concerns, daily dangers and future hazards are barely visible. The risk experiences of mentally ill offenders and ambiguities surrounding what constitutes an everyday life are often not acknowledged. Instead, the lives of forensic patients are described primarily in terms of expert discourses in which assessments are made of the potential harm they pose to themselves and others. This paper presents the case for qualitative research within a sociocultural theory framework that systematically addresses what forensic patients regard as risks as they move through forensic systems. Appropriate examples of research from multidisciplinary, critical and clinical research are reviewed. A sociocultural framework, as expounded by risk theorists such as Lupton (1999a), is compared with recent social constructionist accounts of risk experiences (Bradley & Morss, 2002) and realist risk positions built on expert - patient and expert - layperson dichotomies. To allay concerns that sociocultural theory might be applied uncritically to forensic settings, the 1999 analysis by Todorov of moral life in concentration camps is used to highlight a problematic homogenising tendency in contemporary sociocultural descriptions of risk in everyday life. The paper concludes by noting that forensic psychologists are ideally positioned not only to pursue multidisciplinary research that generates new risk perspectives and knowledge, but also to address the limitations of some sociocultural theories of extra-ordinary individuals.