The proper place for the committer of a crime is prison custody not psychiatric hospital inpatient care.

摘要

The issue of involuntary hospitaliza-. tion in Israel is highly controversial: it is a meeting point between the medical world and the Law. With much interest I read the article by Bergman-Levy and co-authors on the British experience, appearing in this issue of the journal [1]. True, the care and treatment of violent patients is consuming a larger and larger portion of staff time. True also, that the courts are referring increasingly more defendants to the psychiatric system for diagnosis and treatment. Yet, I am not persuaded that Britain's experience is relevant to us in Israel or that we should copy their model. The size of the two populations is very different; the population mix is different, and no less different is the legislation governing the two care and treatment systems. This is not the place, I think, to set out the details of these disparities, the more so as we have yet to say a word on the economic aspect. Is the British model really worth the large financial investment required to replicate it here? This is not at all evident.