The Punishment of Mentally Ill Offenders in Belgium : Between Punishment and Care, Punitiveness and Risk Management,
(2015) Champ pénal — Vol. XII, n° 1, p. 1-30 (NaN) (2015)
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- Abstract
- Since 1930, Belgium has a law for the protection of society (“défense sociale”) aimed at guarding society against the dangerously insane. That law responded to one of the prevailing issues in late 19th century Europe: the question of “abnormal individuals”, a category that included insane offenders perceived as dangerous. The 1930 Social Defense Act prescribed a special regime and immediately demonstrated deep-seated ambivalence, oscillating between care and safety, a criminalizing version of care and a medicalized version of punishment. Reformed in 1964, the current version of the law actually tends to reinforce the penal character of protection of society and its close association with risk management. Our analysis shows that the development of an actuarial logic in the criminal justice field, pointed up in recent years, is not all that new, and that this trend most probably evidences the return or revenge of a probabilistic risk logic over determinist dangerousness models, rather than the dawn of a “new penology”.
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Citations
Cliquennois, G. (2015). The Punishment of Mentally Ill Offenders in Belgium : Between Punishment and Care, Punitiveness and Risk Management,. Champ pénal, XII(1), 1-30 (NaN). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185846 (Original work published 2015)