Afterwords

• Author: Jamie Fellner
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318907
• Published date: 01 August 2008
• Date: 01 August 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

AFTERWORDS

A Few Reflections

JAMIE FELLNER

Human Rights Watch

He is too modest to acknowledge it, but this issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior is

not just edited by Hans Toch. It is a celebration of the profound influence he has had

on the conceptualization of prisons and the fit or misfit with the persons they confine. The

misfit depicted in this issue revolves around the mutual inability of mentally disordered

prisoners and prison officials to cope with each other, an inability that takes on ever greater

significance as the absolute as well as proportionate number of mentally troubled men and

women in U.S. prisons continues to surge. I want to use this opportunity to underscore sev-

eral of the themes that cut across the articles and then add my own thoughts regarding the

use of a human rights framework to assess the conundrums limned in these pages.

DISTURBED AND DISTURBING PRISONERS

In all of his writing, Toch has put people front and center—disturbed and disturbing

people; miserable people expert at making others miserable as well; lost, benighted, annoy-

ing, frightening, vulnerable, and afflicted people. But he never has let us forget that for all

their mental health, behavioral, and even moral disorders, they are humans nonetheless. He

gives them names, he gives them histories, he does not hide them behind the categories and

abstractions dear to many academics.

The pages in this special issue also are filled with examples of such inept, habitually

maladaptive, and self-destructive people, for example, Mr. Abbot, Mr. Baker, and others

named and unnamed. They also include Miriam and Violet, because as Elaine Lord reminds

us, women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population, and a much higher

proportion of them have mental health problems than men.1At Bedford Hills, the maximum

security prison for women in New York that Ms. Lord ran for many years, half of the pris-

oners were on the mental health caseload, and 80% of all unusual incidents involved men-

tally ill women (Lord, 2008 [this issue]).

Male or female, prisoners with mental illnesses and disorders often try the patience and

goodwill of staff as well as other inmates, often past the breaking point. They come to

prison with long-standing patterns of behavior and thinking; dysfunctional as they were in

the free world, they are even more so behind bars. As Toch and the other authors in this

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 35 No. 8, August 2008 1079-1087

DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318907

© 2008 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology