Half a century of madness and badness: some diverse recollections

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Acknowledgement

My sincere thanks to Mrs. Janet Kirkwood for (as on so many past occasions) turning my barely legible manuscripts into polished finished products.

Notes

1. I am very grateful to the Editor for alerting me to the Santayana quotation and for several helpful editorial suggestions.

2. In fact, the recollections cover some 55 years.

3. The Criminal Justice Act was a very forward-looking piece of legislation in its promotion of a wide range of custodial penalties, replacing a number that were out-moded. Not the least of these innovations was the provision for making probation orders with a requirement for in- or out-patient treatment for more minor mental conditions (see also Home Office, 1939).

4. Those wishing to explore the early and more recent development of the Probation Service and the training for it should consult Burnett (2007), Prins (1964, 2007b), and Smith (2006). The notion of a ‘joined-up’ service–that is, a combination of prison and probation work as currently provided by NOMS–is not new. Way back in the 1960s, when I was in the probation inspectorate, consideration was being given to a correctional system combining both prison and probation services. Until 1962, when it was abolished, prison administration was in the hands of the Prison Commission–a semi-independent body with wide-ranging functions. Its membership had included such luminaries as Sir Lionel Fox. The Commission became the Prison Department and subsequently, like so many others, a government executive agency. Plus ça change! (See Fox, 1952, for an excellent account of the earlier history of prison administration.)

5. So-called generic Social Services Departments came into being largely as a result of the Younghusband (DHSS 1959) and Seebohm committees of inquiry into local authority and allied social service provisions (Home Office et al. 1968).

6. For a recent detailed (and often amusing) commentary on the state of forensic psychiatry see an extended editorial by my friend Doctor Adrian Grounds in Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health (2008) and short editorial responses by Professors Alec Buchanan, Anthony Maden and Pamela Taylor.