Rehabilitation in forensic psychiatry: Punishment or treatment?

This paper evaluated whether the pattern of care of forensic psychiatric patients in Auckland, New Zealand implied treatment for their illness, or punishment for their offending. The research sought to determine whether progress for these patients was correlated with clinical improvement and/or clinically mediated risk reduction, or by time served proportional to the severity of their offending, and/or other criminological factors. Access to unsupervised leave was used as a proxy measure of rehabilitative progress. A non-experimental cross-sectional analysis of all 96 patients rehabilitating at the Auckland Regional Forensic Psychiatry Services (ARFPS) was undertaken. The relationship between patient access to unsupervised leave and a comprehensive range of clinical, risk assessment and criminological variables was examined. Results indicated that progress was generally correlated with the clinical, but not other, variables, suggesting that a therapeutic paradigm prevailed.

Keywords:

• Risk prediction
• rehabilitation
• forensic patient
• HCR-20
• LSP
• HoNOS