Ethical Decision Making for Correctional Mental Health Providers

Abstract

Clinicians who practice correctional mental health care face a number of unique ethical challenges as the result of the correctional environment. Each mental health care profession has a code of ethics to help guide clinicians in practice, but correctional mental health clinicians have sometimes concluded that the ethics codes of their associations provide insufficient guidance for their unique challenges. The American Correctional Health Services Association and the American Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology have developed codes of ethics, which provide mental health care providers a well-balanced, clinician-derived guide for ethical clinical practice in corrections. These specialized codes complement existing general ethical principles in decision making for correctional mental health providers. The major principles of welfare of the client, informed consent, competence, dual relationships, confidentiality, and social responsibility are reviewed, and case examples are provided to illustrate the ethical decision-making process.