Heather Y. Bersot

The Ethics of Mechanical Restraints in Prisons and Jails: A Preliminary Inquiry from Psychological Jurisprudence

According to the American Correctional Association (ACA, 2008), mechanical restraint use is to be limited, preventing injury to self and/or to others when administered and certainly not applied to inmates as a punitive or protracted intervention. Regrettably, however, the ongoing use of control devices raises a number of thorny questions when deployed in prisons and jails. This article systematically reviews these concerns. Specifically, the health and mental health consequences for incarcerates are delineated, and the race, gender, class, and mental disability disparities that correspondingly attach are examined. Given these myriad concerns, the ethical justifications that serve as support for or opposition to this correctional practice are described. The article concludes by provisionally recommending how the philosophy of psychological jurisprudence, informed by insights derived from restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence, functions as a type of virtue ethics that re-conceives the problems posed by mechanical restraint use. The resultant strategy promotes healing, advances justice, and grows integrity for the kept and for their keepers, managers, and watchers.

Responding to sex offenders: empirical findings, judicial decision making, and legal moralism

The science examining institutional and community-based responses to sexual offending has been well documented. The responses to this form of criminal behavior include penal incarceration followed by civil commitment, community notification, and sex offender registration. To date, evidence-based findings report that these correctives and/or curatives yield limited effectiveness sufficient to justify their continued maintenance as statewide or even national criminal justice and mental health policy prescription. One official systems-level way that policy receives legitimacy is through the Courts. Interestingly, the precedent-setting sex offender case law indicates that current policy prescriptions are constitutionally permissible and therefore justifiable as regulatory practices, notwithstanding the empirical evidence that challenges their soundness. This article summarizes the science regarding sex offender policy from the point of imprisonment to reentry, recounts the relevant case law that judicially sanctions such institutional and community practices, and explains how the driver for sex offender law and policy is legal moralism grounded in and advanced by utilitarian reasoning and duty-based logic. This article concludes by suggesting how judicial reliance on legal moralism could further the interests of public safety and civil liberties if insights from virtue jurisprudence informed the analysis.

Psychological Jurisprudence: Problems with and Prospects for Mental Health and Justice System Reform

Critical scholars working at the intersection of mental health and criminal justice continue to raise concerns about the embedded socio-cultural dynamics that underlie, inform and shape institutional (and community) levels of service delivery (e.g., Allan et al., 2009; Dobransky, 2014; Fox et al., 2009). These dynamics typically construct and limit the identities of various offender groups or other stakeholders (Arrigo et al., 2011), specify and restrict the form and function of legitimate treatments (Polizzi et al., 2014a; see Mathews, this volume), and regulate and enforce programmatic compliance through methods of bureaucratic efficiency and/or measures of disciplinary control (Crewe, 2009; Rhodes, 2004). We submit that responding to crime and reforming through treatments that further these dynamics are clinically problematic. Indeed, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, maintaining these relations of humanness is habitually totalising because they engender the power to harm (e.g., Arrigo, in press; Bersot and Arrigo, 2010; Sellers and Arrigo, 2009). This is the power to reduce and repress the humanity of everyone involved given that the institutional realities outlined above are based on and sustained by processes of intensifying dehumanisation and depersonalisation (see Mathews, this volume). Those impacted by these processes include the kept (the imprisoned) and those on whom confinement depends (the collective keepers of the kept). Currently, the condition of this relationship (and the struggle to be human within and throughout it) signals that we are living in and among a ‘society of captives’ (Arrigo, 2013, p. 672; see also Sykes, 1958).

Behavioral Forensic Science: An Overview

The subfield of behavioral forensic science or ‘forensic psychology’ consists of three educational philosophies. These philosophies include the clinical, the law–psychology, and the law–psychology–justice frameworks. Each framework or model represents a way of thinking about and doing behavioral forensic science. Several distinct facets of each educational model are delineated. These facets consist of didactic framework, definition of the client–practitioner relationship, preferred method of intervention, and understanding of the psychologist–organization relationship. A number of recommendations for improving the future direction of each philosophys educational mission are specified.