Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK´s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Finally, the reduction in the number of psychiatric beds could be a possible explanation of the
increasing criminality among the mentally ill. As mentioned earlier it is possible to collect
monthly data on the number of forensic patients in each county from 1980 until 1997.
Furthermore, it is possible to collect data on the number of disposable psychiatric beds in each
county. Also it is possible to obtain the number of occupied beds, i.e. the number of consumed
beds. These numbers are received from The Institute of Psychiatric Demography in Aarhus.
During the period 1980 to 1997 a dramatic change has taken place in the mental health care
system. Back in the 1980 we still had the large mental hospitals, whose patients were not only
from the local county, but also from the neighbour-counties. During two decades the mental
health care system has been reorganized into community mental health care and social support
to psychiatric patients. In Denmark a substantial part of this reorganization has consisted in a
transfer of resources from the large mental hospitals into community mental health care. The
reorganization implied or included a close down of psychiatric beds in the order of 55%.
However, a reorganization of a naturally grown system adapted to the increasing need of
mental health care into a “from above” planned system of local community health care, does
not take place without expenses. The needs from the real world seldomly fits into the planed
needs. Thus, a radical reorganization should be expected to be reflected within different areas
of the mental health care.
However, the speed of the reorganization of the mental health care system differed between
the counties. This gives us an opportunity to consider the reorganization as a quasi
experimental setting, in which the counties are the experimental units and “the speed of
reorganization” is the intervention and the growth rate of forensic patients is the outcome.
It should noted that from 1980 until today which is the study period, there has been no
changes what so ever concerning the Danish registration of mentally abnormal offenders;
there has been no changes in diagnostic criteria used by forensic psychiatrists; no changes in
how the prosecution administrates the rules of mental abnormal criminals and no changes in
other part of the system dealing with forensic patients. The fact, that the whole system has
remained unchanged in our study period, is of course very important, because new legislation
or other changes could influence the number of patients. Furthermore, the Penal code is the
same for the whole country covering all 15 counties, and as previously mentioned, the
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