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3 J. Forensic Psychiatry & Psych. 1 (1992)

handle is hein.journals/jnlofncpy3 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL 1971: an audit of dreams MALCOLM FAULK In 1971 Iwas appointed the sixth regional jointly appointed forensic psychiatrist. In that year we all met regularly at the Maudsley and planned the future of forensic psychiatry. These regional posts were approximately six sessions for the Home Office and five for the National Health Service (NHS)- posts dreamed up by the Gwynne Committee (Home Office, 1964) to attract psychiatry into the prison, to treat the untreatable, to leaven the leaden penal lump of dough. Our untitled leader and mentor was the late Peter Scott, self-confessed idealist who felt no need to apologize for that. Our models were Herstedvester Prison in Copenhagen (Stilrup, 1968), the Dutch system of clinics for the psychopath (Roosenburg, 1966) and Grendon Prison (Gray, 1974). We saw personal distress, psychological disturbance and dysphoria in the psychology of many of the inmates of prison. We saw neuroses, emotional turmoil, loss of control, pathological anger and gross inadequacy in such damaged and dysfunctional people. Our task was to relieve that condition in so far as psychiatry could do so. At that stage psychotic offenders did not present an administrative problem as was to happen later. Severe mental illness was, as far as one could judge, still dealt with by the psychiatric hospitals though Henry Rollin cried from the early 1960s, as a voice in the wilderness, that all was not well there either (Rollin, 1969). Our dream was of a system of treatment for these disturbed offenders and inmates which would permeate the penal system, dealing with the problems there, supported by clinics and outpatients in the NHS - a unified approach rather than a split one. Separating the treatable into the NHS to leave the rest to be punished was to ignore and fail to appreciate the severity and extent of the psychopathology of the personality-disordered inmate. There were other dreams. Patrick McGrath, then superintendent of Broad- moor, saw the problem from the very different perspective of the Special Hospitals where overcrowding was an insult to humanity (McGrath, personal communication). Relief to them would require large regional secure units (200-plus beds) which would not only relieve the Special Hospitals of those ready for a trial period before going to the community but give asylum to those

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