The relationship between criminogenic risk and mental illness in justice-involved persons with mental illness (PMI) is complex and poorly understood. As previously noted, the general public is misinformed on the nature of this relationship, erroneously believing that mental illness causes violence and crime. This perception is compounded by news reports immediately speculating about mental illness in response to sensationalized criminal acts such as mass shootings, as well as in popular and social media. Of greater concern, however, is when clinicians, administrators, and policymakers are also misinformed. Criminal risk includes static (e.g. age, gender) and dynamic (e.g. antisocial attitudes, substance misuse) factors that place an individual at greater risk of involvement in crime.

While at the University of Chicago from 1916 to 1917 and from 1919 to 1946, Jacob Viner became famous for his teaching of “Economics 301,” a price theory course, which, as Paul Samuelson (, 6) remembered it, was “celebrated for Viner’s ferocious manhandling of students, in which he not only reduced women to tears but on his good days drove returned paratroopers into hysteria and paralysis.” The folklore of the Chicago School claims that through this course Viner enlightened and inspired future Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director. For example, about Director, Ronald Coase states that Jacob Viner’s price theory course “swept away like chaff in a windstorm the nebulous idealism … of [Director’s youth]” (1998, 602).

Although Viner may have initially inspired the leaders of the postwar Chicago School, it would be a mistake to assume that Viner was in full agreement with or closely tied to this school. About twenty years after he left the University of Chicago, Viner recalled that he had heard “rumors about a ‘Chicago School’” that was engaged in an “organized battle” against collectivism. Viner stated that he “remained skeptical” about this until he attended a 1951 conference at the Chicago Law School, which Aaron Director and Edward Levi headed and the Volker Fund financed. “From then on,” Viner wrote, “I was willing to consider the existence of a ‘Chicago School,’ (but one not confined to the economics department and not embracing all of the department).” Viner added that: “But at no time was I consciously a member of it, and it is my vague impression that if there was such a school it did not regard me as a member, or at least a loyal and qualified member.”

The Chicago School is typically associated with a pro-patent position: They have defended patents on the grounds that they are vital to encourage innovation and have condemned claims that patents allow patent-holding firms to extend their monopoly power from one market to another. The Nobel Prize–winning Chicago economist, George Stigler, claimed that an inventor’s financial incentive was optimum only if he had exclusive and perpetual ownership of the patent. Steven Cheung, a third-generation representative of the Chicago School, observed in 1977: “In a free society an individual owns his brain, and by way of a number of different arrangements he may utilize and market the outputs of this mental resource to generate income” (Cheung , 597). To Cheung, the patent system was the best way to facilitate this generation of income. In 1973, Ward Bowman, a principal proponent of the Chicago law and economics movement in the 1960s and 1970s, maintained that alleged forms of patent misuse might “actually be the most efficient use of the patent from the social as well as the private point of view. It pays monopolists as well as competitors to be efficient” (1973, 9). More recently, in 2006, Richard Epstein, a public face of Chicago law and economics, defended the pharmaceutical industry from prospective regulations. Taking a pro-patent position, he stated, “[Pharmaceutical companies] are very heavily dependent on the patent law, [which] have allowed these firms to bring a wide variety of vital products to market” (Epstein ).

However, members of the Chicago School did not always take a pro-patent position. In the 1930s, the respected University of Chicago professor and self-identified classical liberal, Henry Simons, described monopoly in all its forms, including “gigantic corporations” and “other agencies of price control,” as “the great enemy of democracy” because they undermined the necessary condition for democracy to flourish, namely, a competitive market. In championing democracy and competitive markets, Simons displayed a broad hostility toward patents and claimed that the patent system enabled the creation and extension of monopoly power.