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45 J. Offender Rehab. xxiii (2007)

handle is hein.journals/wjor45 and id is 1 raw text is: Mental Health Issues in the Criminal Justice System. Pp. xxiii-xxiv. Available online at http://jor.haworthpress.com @ 2007 by The Ha worth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Preface At the time of this writing, it has not been two weeks since the Vir- ginia Tech shooting claimed the lives of more than 30 people. This case was particularly tragic to myself and book contributor Keith Durkin as we were graduate students at Virginia Tech for several years during the 1990s. Since the shootings much has been learned about the solo mass murderer. He suffered from some form of mental illness and had been seen by mental health professionals. He had even been held for psychiatric observation and been legally deemed a danger to himself. The very next day following the shootings I had to give a presentation entitled Mentally Ill People in the Criminal Justice. This presentation had been scheduled more than two months previous. At this presenta- tion everyone in the room knew my personal connection to Virginia Tech and the title of the presentation. They expected to hear me speak about the Virginia Tech shooting, the mind of a mass murderer, and how such people can be picked from the crowd before they harm others. What could be more dramatic than 30 + people killed by an offender with mental illness, building doors chained to prevent escape, and 170 + rounds fired? I let the audience know that this case was not the typical intersection of mental health and criminal justice and that I would speak about primarily non-killers who suffer from a mental illness who are a part of the criminal justice system and need treatment. In subsequent days, many newspaper stories discussed the idea that if mentally ill peo- ple don't want treatment, they should be forced into it and that people who fit some kind of potential mass murderer profile should be held over for psychiatric observation. I was very frustrated and let more than one reporter know that we have an obligation to treat those persons with

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