Public Protection

I welcome the Home Secretary’s announcements today and hope that they will lead to greater protection for the public, not least because it must surely be wrong that the system has put the public at unnecessary risk in a series of individual cases. Turning to psychiatric provision, most psychiatrists would say that paranoid schizophrenia, which leads to much of the violent psychotic behaviour that we are discussing, has no known effective and reliable treatment. Can one imprison somebody for a crime that they might possibly commit? Can we make a realistic judgment whether someone is mad or bad, and how can we reliably introduce such judgments into the criminal justice system?