Annex 1
Copy of a letter from Mr Peter Fallon
QC to the Clerk of the Home Affairs Committee
FIRST REPORT: MANAGING DANGEROUS PEOPLE WITH
SEVERE PERSONALITY DISORDER
I read with some interest the evidence of The Rt
Hon Paul Boateng MP and Mr Mike Boyle given to your Select Committee,
and your First Report which I downloaded yesterday from the Government
website.
When I read the evidence some weeks ago I was
a little surprised to see no mention of the solution we proposed
in Part 7 of Vol 1 of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into
the Personality Disorder Unit, Ashworth Special Hospital. It may
be this was because nothing was mentioned in the Home Office "Proposals
for Policy Development" and the same can be said of the Department
of Health's Green Paper on proposed changes to the Mental Health
Act 1983.
My Committee and I were somewhat concerned with
some of the contents of both papers and we felt that it was impossible
to deal with each paper separately because they were concerned
with the same problem. We therefore set about writing "Comments
on the Proposals for Policy Development", the paper your
Committee is concerned with and sent them to Dr Dilys Jones who
chairs the joint Home Office and Department of Health. She said
she would send copies to Mike Boyle and the relevant person in
the Department of Health, whose name I forget. I have no doubt
that she copied our comments to them.
Frankly I feel that if your Committee had seen
our comments, some member would have wanted to ask some questions
about our proposed solution which is centred around the concept
of the "Reviewable Sentence" first mooted in 1975 in
the Butler Report, albeit for a slightly different purpose.
I see from list at the end of your Report no
mention is made of our comments. I am therefore enclosing a copy
of them which were agreed by the whole of my Committee. If you
have not seen the document, you might care to read it and share
it with your colleagues.
In addition to the comments we have made I could
add a few observations arising from my reading of the evidence
I have referred to and your Report.
1. The TBS system in Holland. There is no
third service in Holland. We visited three Units. The TBS units
are all within the Prison system. More recently in Holland it
has been decided that there is a group of psychopaths who are
untreatable, and small units are being built within the prison
system where they can be contained in humane circumstances. The
TBS units are staffed by two groups. Security is in the hands
of the prison service and they take no part in the therapeutic
side. The therapeutic side is predominantly staffed by social
therapists. The doctors we met were critical of the mechanics
of the TBS system to this extent. If an offender is deemed to
require therapy then why should he have to wait until he has completed
a term in prison before he receives the therapy? From a medical
point of view that seems to be absurd.
2. The Van Der Hoeven Clinic in Utrecht.
You seem to have visited this clinic, and Mr Boateng spoke of
it. This centre was well known to one of our Committee, Professor
Bluglass who has visited it many times and indeed it has close
ties with the medium secure unit in England, "Raeside",
which Professor Bluglass set up and which is modelled upon it.
(See Vol I of our report (page 465). It is very like our medium
secure units and by and large does not deal with DSPDS.
3. We spent two weeks hearing evidence from
experts in this field. Their evidence is collated in Vol II of
our Report. The conclusion we reached was that (with the exception
of one Dr Bob Johnson who thought all psychopaths were treatable),
the experts felt that many people with personality disorder did
respond but the more severe the disorder was the less response.
A comparatively small number were untreatable.
4. Dangerousness from the public point of
view was often associated with severe personality disorder, but
not limited to it. Some with severe personality disorder were
not also dangerous. Some with non-serious personality disorder
were dangerous. Some offenders with no personality disorder at
all were dangerous. This was one of the reasons which prompted
us to recommend the Reviewable Sentence which could be used also
for dangerous offenders who were not psychopathic. We tested our
proposed system of using the reviewable sentence at two seminars,
one on management and the other on the law. The concept was overwhelmingly
approved.
15 March 2000
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