Prison psychiatry and professional responsibility

Professional responsibility is a multifaceted concept embracing elements of technical competence and accountability. It may seem anachronistic to examine professional responsibility in the context of prison psychiatry, which is a relatively unpopular and often controversial health service activity. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it appears that prison psychiatry presents a paradigm of the uncertainties, conflicts, and dilemmas which underlie current concerns about professional responsibility in psychiatry. In this paper, the author examines some of these issues and proposes some tentative answers, focusing on the critical question of the proper roles of psychiatry in prisons.