Special criminal sanctions for offenders with mental disorders: Tendencies and challenges in Bulgaria and Norway

This paper provides a comparative discussion of the use of special criminal sanctions for offenders with mental disorders in Bulgaria and Norway. Such sanctions can be used in both countries for offenders that are acquitted by reason of their mental state at the time of the act to prevent them from reoffending. The overall focus is to discuss the tendencies and challenges regarding the institutionalization of people with mental disorders and the use of special criminal sanctions to this end. The authors investigate how Bulgaria and Norway differ regarding how these sanctions and related mental health and forensic systems are organized. Moreover, the authors contextualize these findings in view of the major differences between the countries regarding available mental health resources and capacities. The authors show that both countries have several challenges, including the conditions in hospitals and mental health stigma, but that these are somewhat different in character and severity. An intriguing observation is that a problematic increase of the use of the criminal justice system to hospitalize people with mental disorders seems to happen in Norway but not in Bulgaria, and that this difference seems to be attributed to resources.