Member

Finally, I will raise an issue that threatens to confuse our aim of reducing the use of prisons as a place of safety: the contested diagnosis of personality disorder. That is often used, in fact, to define and label people as dangerous or risky, while potentially masking mental health problems. It has been used in relation to IPP prisoners, whose failure to accept the inequities of their sentence can be pathologised as anti-sociability and disordered personality, but it is also a syndrome that is prevalent in the women’s estate and in young offender institutions.