Heather Ellis Cucolo

The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Evidence, Ethics, and Human Rights

Public policy is necessarily a political process with the law and order issue high on the political agenda. Consequently, working with sex offenders is fraught with legal and ethical minefields, including the mandate that community protection automatically outweighs offender rights. In addressing community protection, contemporary sex offender treatment is based on management rather than rehabilitation. We argue that treatment-as-management violates offender rights because it is ineffective and unethical. The suggested alternative is to deliver treatment-as-rehabilitation underpinned by international human rights law and universal professional ethics. An effective and ethical community–offender balance is more likely when sex offenders are treated with respect and dignity that, as human beings, they have a right to claim.

Reassessing the Aftercare Treatment of Individuals Found not Guilty Due to a Mental Disability in Hunan, China: Supplemental Study into the Disposition of Mentally Ill Offenders after Forensic Psychiatric Assessment

Objective: The purpose of the present paper was to examine the disposition of individuals in Hunan, China who are found not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder or defect. Method: Self-developed questionnaires were mailed to the family members of 240 patients who had received forensic psychiatric evaluations at the forensic psychiatric assessment center of Central South University, between 2001 and 2002. Results: One hundred and seventy questionnaires were fully completed and returned by the patients’ family members. According to the answers, 64.1% (109 patients) were found not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder or defect. In 87.6% of the cases, a judgement of guilty was in agreement with the psychiatrists recommendation concerning criminal responsibility. A total of 61.8% of the patients found not guilty were discharged to their families and did not receive any further psychiatric treatment. Conclusion: In most cases, judicial decisions are consistent with a psychiatrists opinion of criminal responsibility due to a mental disorder or defect. After such adjudication, further psychiatric treatment is often neglected due to the lack of resources and information. Hunan, China must make a continued investment into the availability and quality of outpatient mental health treatment for forensic patients after they have been discharged.

Online Mental Disability Law Education, a Disability Rights Tribunal, and the Creation of an Asian Disability Law Database: Their Impact on Research, Training and Teaching of Law, Criminology Criminal Justice in Asia

Two professors at New York Law School (NYLS) and the director of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office are engaged in initiatives with the potential to have major influences on the study of law, criminology and criminal justice: the creation of a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific (DRTAP) and expansion of NYLS’s online mental disability law programme (OMDLP) to include numerous Asian venues. DRTAP seeks to create a sub-regional body (a Commission and eventually a Court) to hear violations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This will explicitly inspire scholarship about issues such as treatment of forensic patients, relationships between mental disability enforcement and criminal law enforcement, and connections between mental disability and criminal procedure. NYLS’s OMDLP offers thirteen valuable courses to criminologists and criminal justice scholars and will host DRICAP (Disability Rights Information Center for Asia and the Pacific), providing Internet access to important disability rights developments from ten nations in the Asia/Pacific region. This partnership offers unrivalled knowledge in criminal justice and mental disability law. Our article will detail and explain how these programmes train, teach and foster new research, distinctively benefiting Asia’s legal/advocacy/criminology/criminal justice communities.