Mental Illness, Criminal Responsibility and Prison Administration: Bridging the Gap Between Law and Healthcare

Mental illness occupies an uneasy position as the intersection of two systems, whose constructions have different intentions. The criminal law poses a question on whether an individual has committed a wrong act, whereas the healthcare question is how an individual can be cured and assisted to recuperate. When an individual with a severe mental illness gets into a confrontation with our legal system, these two questions collide and the location that the collision occurs the most is prison. The paper will discuss the connection between mental illness and criminal responsibility and prison management and will argue that the disparity between the law and healthcare is not only due to limited resources, but a structural aspect of the nature of the two systems. It unites three groups of evidence. The initial one is the epidemiological fact, which has been unchanged over decades and dozens of countries, a serious mental illness is many times more prevalent in the population of prison than in the overall population. Second is the legal doctrine of criminal responsibility, which dates back to the MNaghten rules of 1843 to the current Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code and its recent equivalent, Section 22 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, based on a narrow criterion of cognition and excluding much of contemporary psychiatric knowledge. The third is the prison administrative reality, with more and more mentally crippled inmates colliding with a gross lack of trained personnel and legal structure whose assurances are not upheld in every aspect. The paper analyzes these three strands in the concepts of the therapeutic gap, the diversion, and the right to health and suggests that four changes to law, healthcare, and the test of responsibility, the channels that prevent the mentally ill to prisons and the quality of care within the prison itself must be all reformed at once. Keywords: India.; Criminal Responsibility; mental illness; insanity defence; prison mental health; forensic psychiatry; Mental Healthcare Act; diversion