Will They Do it Again?

Risk Assessment and Management in Criminal Justice and Psychiatry

Herschel Prins, Prof Herschel Prins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134721108
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Focus in the media on the risks posed to ordinary people has become increasingly strong in recent years - particularly on those risks popularly perceived to be posed by the mentally ill. But how justified is this concern? How do we best manage so-called dangerous people?
In Will They Do It Again? Herschel Prins considers the issue of public protection within a broad context of risk in society generally, examining the concerns arising in contemporary society from dealing with uncertainty. It is argued that public fear over the danger posed by the mentally ill is at odds with the evidence, and that much of the concern is focused on a small number of high-profile cases. Prins goes on to examine such cases where management of the mentally ill has failed and sets out suggestions for improvements in practice.
Will They Do It Again? cuts through popular misunderstanding and media hype over risk to give a clear, unbiased picture of the real risks to society from the mentally ill and how best they can be contained and managed, and will prove invaluable to a range of practitioners involved in the fields of criminal justice and psychiatry.

Chapter 1

Understanding uncertainty

Risk is ubiquitous and no human activity can be considered risk free.

Royal Society, Risk

Giddens states that ‘A risk Society is a Society where we can increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no-one completely understands and which generates a diversity of possible futures’ (in Franklin, 1998: 25). Much recent writing about risk seems to centre around the problem identified by Giddens, namely the reconciliation of advances in the boundaries of knowledge and invention on the one hand, and coping with the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties that such developments create on the other. One thing is very clear: humankind¹ abhors ambiguity and uncertainty; humans will engage in dubious and sometimes harmful practices to avoid them. Much recent and current concern about ‘dangerous’ people has its roots in these phenomena; unless they are properly understood many of our efforts aimed at dealing with such people will fail. Ulrich Beck puts an eloquent gloss on the matter. He highlights the fact that what he describes as ‘manufactured uncertainty… has become an inescapable part of our lives and everybody is facing unknown and barely calculable risks’. He continues:

Calculating and managing risks which nobody really knows has become one of our main preoccupations. That used to be a specialist job for actuaries, insurers and scientists. Now, we all have to engage in it, with whatever rusty tools we can lay our hands on – sometimes the calculator, sometimes the astrology column.

(Beck in Franklin, 1998: 12)

In modern society, politicians are frequently answerable for the activities of the experts Beck refers to, over whom they have little control and even less knowledge. For this reason professional decision makers should not fall into the trap of encouraging the public to think that they can be protected from all forms of risk. This is of considerable importance in the area of criminal justice and mental health. An analogy drawn from psychiatry as practised in the 1950s and early 1960s may help to make my point clear. At that time, some psychiatrists were rather over- optimistic about the degree to which, armed with recently developed drugs, they could provide effective remedies for mental illness. A degree of initial success on their part, created in the minds of the public the notion that maybe psychiatry could effectively deal with other forms of human malaise or, as Szasz suggested, in problems of living (Szasz, 1987). Such expectations were premature and many psychiatrists were to regret later having gone along with these expectations. That they did so was not necessarily due to arrogance on their part, but rather to a degree of over-optimism that psychiatry might have the answers to problems beyond its realistic professional remit. Today, criminal justice and mental health practitioners stand in danger of perpetrating the same errors. This matter is dealt with in more detail in Chapter 5. Anna Coote (1998) has some sensible advice to offer those engaged in the risk business. She suggests that:

. . . we must become skilled at planning for uncertainty. We no longer rely on scientific expertise or economics to predict with any certainty how things will turn out in the future… we must be clear about what we do know and where we really are at present. Planning for uncertainty involves a realistic appraisal of the evidence at our disposal, a deep understanding of the present (not marred by a rose-tinted view of the past).

(Coote, in Franklin, 1998: 129-130)

Beck (1997)² adds emphasis to this view:

Risk Society begins where tradition ends, when, in all spheres of life, we can no longer take traditional certainties for granted. The less we can rely on traditional securities, the more risks we have to negotiate. The more risk, the more decisions and choices we have to make.

(Beck, 1997: 4)

All this supports the contention that, as the writer Sara Maitland says:

Life is a risky business… We are weak and vulnerable and even virtue may not protect us ultimately. Things are not what they seem and may change at any moment, change without human cause… but underneath all this peril there is also a safety; truth and order will somehow be restored.

(Maitland, 1997)

PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF RISK

Where scientific fact falls short of certainty we are guided by assumption, inference and belief.

Adams, 1995

Risk perception is very much an individual matter. A highly sensitive account of how parents perceive risk is that given by Blake Morrison in his book about the Bulger case, As If (1997). Morrison not only covered the trial in detail but also immersed himself in the local scene. In addition, he related his reactions to the trial to his own experiences as husband and father. He writes perceptively about what he describes as the risks of childhood and parents’ fears of childhood disasters; for example, drowning, being run over, murdered, over-lain, cot-death, meningitis, electrocution, fall from a great height, drinking bleach, dying by fire, killed by an animal, in an aeroplane disaster, then, as an adult (but still in the eyes of parents as a child) killed in a car crash, in a flying or shooting accident. The hazards and their accompanying irrational fears seem endless.

Media images of risk

Most of the general public’s fears about risk are generated through the media. A leader in the Independent of 13 July 1996 p. 15 expresses this admirably:

It has been a murderously bad year for the children of England. In a green Kentish lane, a mother, her children and the family pet are set upon. Such was the ferocity of the attack the police labelled the killer ‘deranged’. In the urban West Midlands a man with a machete invades a primary school picnic… teddy bears piled in a corner where terrified children abandoned them as they fled… on Merseyside, a child’s body discovered and a perpetrator sought amid echoes of the Bulger case.

From such quotes, we may be led to assume that the modern technologically sophisticated world is a place quite unfit for our children (and, for that matter, adults) to live in. The media influence is pervasive and damaging to human relations and experience, particularly for children. The numbers of children taxied to school by their worried parents has increased enormously. In 1971, 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-olds were going to school alone; today, it is suggested that fewer than 10 per cent do so (Independent, 22 July 1996, p. 11). As I write this chapter, teachers are expressing a reluctance to protect their small charges from the harmful rays of the sun with barrier creams for fear of being accused of sexual or physical molestation.

However, life has always been full of hazards: we lose our sense of perspective on this at our peril. It is salutary to remind ourselves of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes: ‘No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ (Leviathan, Pt.i, 13). One could find many more examples of what sociological criminologists such as Cohen once described as ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1972). A moral panic ‘is not another way of defining mass hysteria, rather it is a technical term to describe social movements that define a variety of actions, groups or persons as a (serious) threat to fundamental social values’ (La Fontaine, 1998: 19).³

Obtaining a sense of proportion

The following are some facts drawn from various more responsible newspaper accounts of some of life’s real hazards.

Writing about some of the realities of risk, a leader writer in the Independent of 22 July 1996, p. 11 suggested that:

walking was (more) dangerous than cycling, which is more dangerous than travelling by car, which is far more dangerous than flying… in spite of Dunblane and similar incidents, children are still safer in the classroom than in the home.… and they are less at risk from strangers than from parents.

It is worth noting that the child murder rate has remained much the same over the last two decades: eighty-five or so children murdered each year, most of them infants killed by parents.

Despite the truth of these statements it has proved, for example, well nigh impossible to convince many parents that there are more unidentified paedophiles at large in the community than those whose identity is known and who have recently been released from prison.

Similar considerations apply to those individuals known to the psychiatric services who have committed homicide. As we shall see later, their numbers remain fairly stable over time and are very small in comparison to the total number of homicides committed each year. However, such statistics do nothing to dispel the images held by the public of the axe-wielding schizophrenic.

Despite these concerns, people do seem to find ways of putting beyond their immediate comprehension a variety of possible hazardous events. For example, despite the awesome catalogue of IRA outrages, people continued to travel to work in high risk areas, and a great many people did not take very long to return to eating beef following the initial scares about BSE. As the leader writer quoted earlier went on to say, ‘the idea that the department store we are about to walk into could explode around us is almost inconceivable, so is the notion that the tasty steak in front of us could turn our brains to jelly’. But, as the writer concluded, ‘where children are concerned we can imagine the dangers only too well… present us with a story about a battered child and rationality deserts us’.

Some hazardous events

The following table gives an indication of the likelihood of our meeting a hazardous event.

Hartston (in the Independent Magazine, 19 September 1997, pp. 10-11) gives a somewhat humorous, but none the less highly perceptive account of modern risk taking:

Such are the risks we all run every day that, if you are an adult aged between 35 and 54, there is roughly a one-in-400 chance you will be dead within a year. Homo sapiens is a bit of a twit about assessing risks. We buy lottery tickets in the hope of scooping the jackpot, with a one-in-14 million chance of winning, when there’s a one-in-400 chance that we won’t even survive the year… the evidence suggests that our behaviour is motivated by panic and innumeracy.

Hartston attempts to place all of this into perspective:

Table 1.1 Likelihood of involvement in a hazardous event

• On...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Case Examples
• Chapter 1: Understanding Uncertainty
• Chapter 2: Legal and Administrative Aspects
• Chapter 3: Serious Mental Disturbance and Violence
• Chapter 4: With the (Doubtful) Benefit of Hindsight
• Chapter 5: Improving Practice
• Chapter 6: Epilogue