La gravité des faits comme condition à l’internement

Abstract

In Belgium, individuals who commit an offense in a state of mental insanity are sanctioned to a compulsory care measure. This law has been recently revised in order to restrict the scope of this legal sanction. From now on, only offenses that include a “physical or psychological threat” are considered. The idea was to prevent less serious offenses to lead to a compulsory care who generally last many years. In the present study, we examined the index offense of 153 forensic psychotic patients. We correlated crime severity with psychopathology and risk measures. Results indicate that there is no correlation between crime seriousness and psychopathology, and that there is no correlation between crime seriousness and estimates. As expected, psychopathology and risk estimates do correlate. About one out of six forensic psychotic offenders could not be interned with this new criteria. There is no difference in psychopathology nor in risk estimates between patients who were interned for an offense including a psychological or physical threat from those who were interned from an offense without. Our findings suggest that it is possible that the new modification to the law will not reach its purpose and it is unsure whether these patients will easily find proper care within the current (compulsory) mental health system.