Characteristics of the persons accommodated in the special prison hospital in Belgrade

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the profiles of the Special Prison Hospital residents. Residents of prison hospital are psychiatric patients under security measure of compulsory treatment and confinement. The deplorable lack of data on this population both in the foreign and domestic literature has been noticed, so our analysis had a descriptive and explanatory character. First aim was to determine the dimensions and to describe operational profile of the average resident of the Special Hospital. The second task was to understand the marginalization of mentally ill perpetrators of unlawful acts, using the sociological analysis of the social context and the situation in the domestic psychiatry. We examined profiles of the Special Hospital residents using four-dimensional description: socio-demographic characteristics, family profile, clinical and criminal structure. The dimensions are operational by comparable facts drown from the official documentation: records of residents who were at the time of the research placed in the A and B division of the Special Hospital (under so-called psychiatric measures). In this way, we have collected data on 234 patients. With minor variations, we found that forensic patients from Serbia share a number of common features with special patients from other European countries. They are multiple marginalized, from the family abandoned men, whose discharge from the hospital is uncertain since they are not accepted in the community. Their social isolation was recognized as effective and exclusive way to control them. We believe: since it is not possible to apply subtle techniques of neoliberal governance to them.