The care and management of mentally disordered offenders poses a major challenge to criminal justice agencies and psychiatric services. As psychiatric services become increasingly community based rather than hospital based, the task of meeting the needs of the offender, as well as expectations of public protection, becomes a more difficult prospect. Public disquiet about the care of the chronically mentally ill in the community and about the protection afforded by mental health legislation has been voiced. Difficulties are experienced by the police and courts in securing psychiatric care for mentally disordered offenders, and the severely mentally ill are over represented in the remand prison population. Inadequacies in current provision for mentally disordered offenders in Britain are a matter of current concern in both the Home Office and the Department of Health, who have recently carried out a wide ranging review of services for such individuals (Department of Health/Home Office, 1991).

This book brings together the papers and a summary of the discussion presented at a Crop wood Round Table Conference, organized by the Institute of Criminology and the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, in January 1990. The purpose of the conference was to consider future needs and directions in legal and service provision for mentally disordered people in the criminal justice system. A distinguished group of participants representing a wide range of interests attended the conference, and the papers included perspectives from the fields of criminology, sociology and social psychiatry, as well as contributions from administrators and practitioners.

The significance of the conference was threefold. First, contemporary research and service developments in social and community psychiatry were brought to bear on the field of forensic psychiatry. To date, the framework of forensic psychiatry services and mental health legislation has been primarily hospital based. New thinking is required to move beyond this, as the major gap in provision for mentally disordered offenders is now in the community. It is therefore important to take account of the lessons and insights that have emerged from recent work in social psychiatry, and we were fortunate that several of the major figures in the development of social psychiatry and new services for the longterm mentally ill in Britain contributed to the proceedings.