Source: http://jaapl.org/content/38/1/140
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 14:15:40+00:00

Document:
By Fred Cohen, Esq. Second Edition. Kingston, NJ: Civil Research Institute, 2008. Two volumes. 1,114 pp. $237.50.
Professor Fred Cohen comes from a law background and is professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany. Perhaps more significantly, he has been a federal court monitor for correctional medical and dental care in the Ohio state prison system and has acquired first-hand knowledge of incarcerated individuals and the institutions housing them. From this perspective, his two-volume work explores a wide array of topics affecting the mentally disordered incarcerated population.
Cohen presents court decisions, many in considerable detail, to illustrate the various topical areas. Forensic psychiatrists would be familiar with the cases, as they are many of the landmark cases of forensic psychiatry selected by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL). They include such familiar litigations as Youngberg v. Romeo, Rouse v. Cameron, Wyatt v. Stickney, Robinson v. California, Powell v. Texas, Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, and Jaffee v. Redmond, to name a few. These cases readily facilitate the forensic psychiatrist's comprehension of the legal underpinnings of Cohen's work. Nonetheless, correctional mental health litigation has been dominated by whether the threshold of deliberate indifference, as promulgated by Farmer v. Brennan, has been breached. Overall, the reader is exposed in considerable detail to the debate and complexities of deliberate indifference and other legal constructs, which would be expected, since this book is intended for an audience knowledgeable in the law.
Cohen's work contains 21 chapters and a large Appendix. He offers that a prison or jail administrator need only read the second chapter, which provides an overview of the law and the mentally disordered inmate. The forensic or clinical psychiatrist should read much more than the second chapter, to appreciate the mental health and associated clinical practice topics and concerns in the correctional setting, although many of the chapters would be likely to prove laborious and tedious because of the predominant focus on legal matters. The chapters dealing with clinically relevant topics, such as those covering the treatment relationship (Chapter 9), the effect of isolation on mental disability (Chapter 11), and suicide (Chapter 14), would probably command the greatest interest from the forensic or clinical psychiatrist.
Although this two-volume work covers a gamut of topics concerning mental health in the correctional world, the overall length of the two books may be excessive for forensic or clinical psychiatrists. The work contains a relative dearth of pragmatic, clinically relevant material. Some of the length is attributable to the Appendix, which contains excerpts from 10 of the cases explored in the book, a description of the Residential Treatment Unit at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, and the Dunn v. Voinovich consent decree from Ohio. Not only does the material found in the Appendix seem extraneous, it occupies about one-half the space in one of the volumes. Therefore, unless a forensic or clinical psychiatrist has an extreme interest in the tedious legal underpinnings surrounding correctional mental health, this lengthy work, while appearing to be a solid contribution to the legal world, would be best kept on the shelves of libraries and institutions for psychiatrists to consult on an as-needed basis.

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