Disordered personalities and crime : an analysis of the history of moral insanity / David W. Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jones, David W. (David Wyn), 1964- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

People with mental disabilities and crime.

Personality disorders.

Psychopaths.

Mentally ill offenders.

Criminals--Mental health.

Criminals.

Physical Description:

x, 295 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016.

Summary:

Disordered Personalities and Crime seeks to understand better how we respond to those individuals who have been labelled at various points in time as 'morally insane', 'psychopathic1 or 'personality disordered'. Individuals whose behaviour is consistent with these diagnoses present challenges to both the criminal justice system and mental health systems, because the people who come to have such diagnoses seem to have a rational and realistic understanding of the world around them but can behave in ways that suggest they have little understanding of either the meaning or the consequences of their actions. This book argues that an analysis of the history of these diagnoses will help to provide a better understanding of contemporary dilemmas. These are categories that have been shaped not only by the needs of criminal justice and the claims of expertise by professionals, but also by the fears, anxieties and demands of the wider public. In this book, David W. Jones demonstrates how important these diagnoses have been to the history of psychiatry and its claims for professional expertise, and also sheds light on the evolution of the insanity defence and helps explain why it remains a problematic and controversial issue even today. This book will be key reading for students, researchers and academics who are interested in crime and its relationship to mental disorder and also for those interested in psychiatry and abnormal psychology. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Informal insanity in the eighteenth-century court 21

1.1 The Old Bailey, the public sphere and new forms of insanity 22

1.2 The state and the informalisation of control 33

2 The medical discourse of 'moral insanity' 49

2.1 The beginning of psychiatry: the entrepreneurs of the moral world 50

2.2 Medics, moral insanity and the law 61

3 The rise of psychiatry in the post-M'Naghten years 79

3.1 The professionalisation of psychiatry 81

3.2 The Townley case and the crisis of confidence (1863) 84

3.3 Psychiatry, biology and the prison population 91

4 Culture and moral insanity: selfhood and social degeneration 99

4.1 The novel, industrialisation and moral insanity 101

4.2 Degeneracy: psychiatry and culture 109

5 Moral imbecility: feeblemindedness and the road to eugenics 121

5.1 German psychiatry and constitutional psychopathy 123

5.2 Criminal feeblemindedness and eugenics in the USA 128

5.3 The new Municipal Court, Chicago: the 'Psychopathic Laboratory' 136

5.4 Feeblemindedness in the UK 140

6 Psychopathy in the US: psychiatry, psychoanalysis and sexual selves 147

6.1 Sexual psychopath laws in the United States 148

6.2 Sexuality, civilisation and psychoanalysis in the USA 152

7 Social formulations of psychopathy and therapeutic communities 165

7.1 Criminology, radical thinking and planned environments 167

7.2 The development of the social diagnosis: Henderson's Psychopathic States 171

7.3 The Second World War and the rise of community therapy 175

7.4 Psychopathy as a legal category 182

8 DSM and the proliferation of personality disorders 191

8.1 Hervey Cleckley and The Mask of Sanity 193

8.2 Personality disorder and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 197

9 Shifting grounds: the mass media and the insanity defence 213

9.1 Liberalisation in the US; Durham, the AL1 and the insanity defence 215

9.2 The trial of John Hinckley (1982): the end of the insanity defence in the US? 218

9.3 The invention of 'dangerous and severe personality disorder' in the UK 226

10 Concluding discussion: the contemporary debates: policy, theory and treatment 235

10.1 What is the future for moral insanity? 240.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415502061

0415502063

9780415502177

0415502179

OCLC:

919235048