Between autonomy and coercion: caring for mentally disordered offenders in French-speaking Belgium
(2023) EUROCRIM 2023 : The Renaissance of European Criminology — Location: Florence, Italie (2023.September.6AD)
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- Authors
De Spiegeleir, Sophie 
- Abstract
- In Belgium, the criminal internment regime is set out in the 2014 Internment Act. As a security measure, it deprives or restricts the freedom of persons who have committed a criminal offense and who are found unaccountable for their actions due to a mental disorder present at the time of the judicial decision. The measure has a dual purpose: to protect society from potentially dangerous individuals and to provide the necessary care for these individuals in preparation for their social rehabilitation. The 2014 Act requires that the internment measure be based on a "care trajectory”. During such care trajectory internees can be admitted to a medium security forensic psychiatric ward as part of a probationary release, amongst others. These specific medium security wards were set up in the 2000’s as part of general psychiatric hospitals. They take in about thirty people on probation release for a stay that lasts, on average, a year and a half. On the basis of an ethnographic fieldwork carried out during twelve months within two medium security wards in French-speaking Belgium, I have tried to understand what does "caring" mean in a context where criminal justice and mental health systems intertwine. For the professionals I met, recovery matters, but so does security. How do professionals combine these two requirements in practice? A stay in these wards basically aims at (re-)making internees “autonomous” in preparation for social rehabilitation. But what does “autonomous” really mean? The rights and freedom of people in these specific wards are often hindered by the professionals, who use different forms of coercion (from isolation to sanctions, threat and trickery) to carry out their mandate. Based on the fieldwork I have conducted, I will show how professionals justify what is “the right thing to do” in their daily work situations.
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Citations
De Spiegeleir, S. (2023). Between autonomy and coercion: caring for mentally disordered offenders in French-speaking Belgium. EUROCRIM 2023 : The Renaissance of European Criminology, Florence, Italie. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274245