The Criminally Insane is the largest scale in-depth follow-up study on mentally ill criminals yet to appear. This book challenges the assumption that inmates of maximum-security mental hospitals are extraordinarily violent and questions the necessity for maintaining maximum-security institutions which currently house some 15,000 persons in the United States. In 1971, 586 patients were released from a Pennsylvania maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. They were not considered officially "cured," but a federal court held that their commitments had been unconstitutional. Through exhaustive examination of hospital and police records and interviews with hospital administrators and the subjects themselves, Thornberry and Jacoby assess the processes by which the patients had been retained in confinement, the impact of their release upon their communities, and their ability to adjust to the freedom of community life. The authors demonstrate that the patients did not display a significant level of violent behavior during confinement, nor did they pose a major threat to society after release. In fact, their social and psychological adjustment to community life is shown to have been comparable to that of non-criminal mental patients. Yet despite these findings the subjects had been retained in maximum-security confinement for an average of fourteen years because they were predicted to be violent and "dangerous" to society. The authors explain this inaccuracy by a process called "political prediction," in which clinicians avoid any potential risks to the community, the reputation of their hospitals, and their careers by consistently overpredicting dangerous behavior. The Criminally Insane will stimulate response from professionals in a wide variety of fields, including law, criminology, psychiatry, and sociology, and from anyone concerned with society's responsibility to the mentally ill offender.

This is an introductory text on the changing nature of correctional officer careers, focusing on personnel, management, and organizational issues.

Learn how to bet on yourself and build the professional life you want as you grow in your career path In Career Confidence: No-BS Stories and Strategies for Finding Your Power, recruitment, hiring, and job search industry veteran Robynn Storey delivers a detailed roadmap you can use to navigate the increasingly complicated and fast-moving world of work. You’ll learn how to find a job that fulfills and sustains you while also helping you flourish in your chosen career path. Through relatable client stories, the author burns down commonly held hiring myths and explains how to define and demonstrate your value to employers, showing them what you’re really worth. She draws on her extensive, two-decade career in which she’s helped over 300,000 clients find their dream jobs to give you the info you really need to get the job you really want. You’ll also find: Dozens of real-life stories and anecdotes of professional interactions and experiences that are at once humorous, inspiring, and sometimes shocking Strategies for combining the personal moxie that makes you truly unique with your professional work experience to create an irresistible package for employers Techniques for defining your value in both your professional and personal life A must-read guide to a complex employment arena, Career Confidence will earn a place on the bookshelves of job seekers, interviewers, career changers, and professionals everywhere.

An urgent exposéf the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.