capitol punishment

[Pseudo]

[...] but I put that success rate up against all those that were executed in the name of justice, how many of them have recanted their crimes and apologised to their victims/society?

The number is pretty low, granted. But then so is their rate of recidivism.

[Psyber]

Ive thought about this subject long and hard in the past but have still voted "unsure".
Even if 99 out of 100 people convicted of an offence punishable by death it still sits uneasy with me.
What if an innocent party is set up?
Im all for people who are definately guilty to be killed but that one in a hundred, or even a thoustand that may be innocent that gets killed really concerns me enough to not be sure about this topic.

I agree Wedgie - the law has little to do with justice - that's one of the first things law students are told in first year. Certainty is hard to achieve.

[Psyber]

should we have the death penalty fior horrendous or henius acts ???

The list of offences punishable by death would have to include supportiong the bays

It could easily come to include supporting the wrong political party - that is obviously a heinous office in many parts of the world.

When I lived in Adelaide I'd have applied it to Port supporters, but distance has mellowed me.

[rod_rooster]

Ive thought about this subject long and hard in the past but have still voted "unsure".
Even if 99 out of 100 people convicted of an offence punishable by death it still sits uneasy with me.
What if an innocent party is set up?
Im all for people who are definately guilty to be killed but that one in a hundred, or even a thoustand that may be innocent that gets killed really concerns me enough to not be sure about this topic.

I suggest you watch the film "The Life of David Gale". Excellent film on this subject and really makes you think.

[PhilG]

..

[Psyber]

You are right PhilG. There are many neglected groups out there.

At one time, between the days of the old asylums where people got dumped in back wards and forgotten, and when they are now left on the streets largely unsupported, there was a time when longer term accommodation in the psych hospitals was possible preliminary to transfer to sheltered and supervised hostels in the community. However, there will always be those who need true asylum - a refuge to go to and be supported and protected. During the transition to hostels and then to unsupported and uninspected boarding houses, there were those patients who wanted to stay in the long-stay hospitals. It was put down to "institutionalisation" and in some cases it was that, but in others it was genuine asylum and was needed.

Yes, the Autistic Spectrum Disorders still tend to go unrecognised, and in the past severe cases were seen as Schizophrenia sometimes. However, I do know three people working in the professions who have Asperger's, and Bill Gates may have it too! Those acquaintances have used their intellectual capacity to work around the lack of flexibility and difficulty with social skills the condition imposes.

The other group who are neglected are those with borderline intellectual disability. Intellectually retarded services tend to be aimed at those with an IQ under 70, but those between that and the lower end of the "normal" range at 85, tend to be ignored. They, too, struggle to cope unsupported, and if they drift into alcohol and drug abuse can act angrily and destructively under its disinhibiting effect, because they have few other ways of coping with distress and frustration.

Hans Eysenck, a Psychologist in the 1970s and 1980s, once put up the argument that only the group above "normal" [IQ above 115] can do the administrative work of holding a complex society together, and without that group our society would collapse. He expressed concern that that group was being out-bred, because the less intelligent had more children. That poses interesting questions too!

[The IQ figures quoted are based on the WAIS which uses a standard deviation of 15 units.]

My concern is that we have gone too far - having swung from locking all the disabled up to throwing them all out on to the streets without the support that the state governments all promised they would provide when they closed the hospitals and sold the assets. Now, the gaols have become the new asylums, but they only serve this function after something tragic has happened.

[therisingblues]

Some interesting comments there Psyber. When were those services disbanded? You appear very knowledgable of the subject matter. Is this sort of a well publicised thing in Australia now? I haven't lived in Oz for 6 years now.

[Psyber]

Some interesting comments there Psyber. When were those services disbanded? You appear very knowledgable of the subject matter. Is this sort of a well publicised thing in Australia now? I haven't lived in Oz for 6 years now.

I had worked in the SA Mental Health system at one time. This stuff tends to be very hushed up in Australia and denied by state governments and those who want to stay in their employ, but is widely known among the broader health community, and those who try to help people penetrate the defences of the system and actually get help. Geriatric services are slowly going the same way.

The transition from "lockups" to integrated services begain in Oz in the early 1960s as a flow on from the discovery of new antipsychotic medicatiions, beginning with chlorpromazine in 1947. [It was intended to be an antihistamine, and it was a while before its use for anything else caught on widely.]

It was during the mid 1970s that the "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights" [Scientology front] began its campaign in Oz, arguing that existing psych units were "imprisoning" people inappropriately. [Scientology offers an alternative cure involving their "E-meter", being "cleared", and giving 10% of your income to "The Church of the New Faith" instead, and was opposed to competition, especially any that worked.]

This created an atmosphere that enabled state governments to create a basis for moving to free up saleable land locked up in hospitals and save the costs of running the specialist hospital units, and they embraced the "liberalisation" of the old detention laws fairly universally during the early 1980s. First this meant the potentially harmful to themselves or others could not be held until it was irrefutable that they were indeed that, because they had done harm,

In SA, the first aim was to close Glenside and sell the land - valuable housing blocks close to the city in the SE suburbs - but the push to save Glenside's buildings based on their historical background forced the SA government to back down and close Hillcrest instead. Of course that land was not in as sought after an area, and was transferred to the SA Housing Trust for development of economical housing.

The move of the acute beds into general hospitals "and the community", began during the late 1970s, and really gathered momentum in the 1980s. In theory, much of the money saved from closing the hospitals was to go into thes services. In fact they were underfunded, the support in the hostels slowly declined and the overworked CAT teams slowly tightened the definition of mental illness they were meant to deal with in self defence. The law has not changed since the 1980s but what is done within it has shrunk.

In Victoria now, the CAT teams are not interested unless the patient is overtly psychotic and there is strong evidence of pending suicide or homicide - and even then the suicidal ideas tend to be fobbed off as "attention seeking".

The Cornelia Rau saga reflects this change. The Brisbane hospital said, after observing her and sending her back to DIMIA, that while some of her behaviour was strange she did not fit the criteria for Schizophrenia. This translates as, "These days we apply the very strict criteria set up in DSM-IV primarily to make a very tight diagnosis for research purposes and can get away with fobbing off anyone who does not display the full symptom cluster."
i

[PhilG]

..

[therisingblues]

Thanks Psyber. I always like to hear from people close to the source, and you sound as though you're pretty close to the news. I am pretty uninformed about the situation, but I think mental health care is as important as other services available to whomever needs them in a country such as Australia. I hope someone takes note of what needs to be done, and has the clout to do it.