Crime and Mental Health: Implications for Social Work Practice

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore the role that a criminal justice social worker will play when dealing with either mentally ill offenders or victims of crime with mental disorders. The prevalence of mental illness or disorders raises quite distinct challenges for social work practice and it is therefore intended that this study will go some way towards demystifying such issues by making more explicit: (1) the nature and prevalence of the types of mental illnesses commonly suffered by offenders and victims of crime; (2) the justification for social work intervention; (3) the benefits that would accrue from such involvement; (4) the specific non-psychiatric mental health services that social workers may offer to mentally ill prison inmates and victims of crime; and finally (5) some of the challenges faced by criminal justice social workers, and the potential solutions thereto.