A Study of Young Offenders' Perceptions of Health and Health Care Services in Custody and in the Community.

The level of unmet health needs in young offenders has been raised as a concern in recent research with this population. There is a lack of research examining the views of young offenders on health issues and the services available to them. This article summarizes a qualitative study conducted in four young offender institutions in the United Kingdom with young people expressing their attitudes toward aspects of health and the provision of health care services. While there were gaps in their knowledge, the young people were well informed of the services they could access. They also identified barriers to accessing these services and the effect that being in custody could have on their health. Many of the young people thought that the services provided in custody addressed their health needs more successfully than community-based services. Implications for user-informed service delivery to meet their health needs are discussed.

A developmental approach to violence, hostile attributions, and paranoid thinking in adolescence.

Research within the area of paranoid thinking has focused primarily on adults and has only recently looked at the effects during the critical life stage of adolescence, with even less research in the context of the juvenile justice system. This article aims to explore the relationship between antisocial behaviour in adolescence and the development of paranoid thinking, set within wider contexts that surround the juvenile justice system. The information presented is drawn from both the current research and the clinical experiences of those working in adolescent forensic psychiatry services. The relationships with other disorders such as conduct disorder, ADHD, PTSD, and depression are also explored.

Ethnicity and its relevance in a seven-year admission cohort to an English national adolescent medium secure health service unit.

BACKGROUND: There is some research which variously suggests that adults from some ethnic minority groups in the UK may be disproportionately likely to attract certain psychiatric diagnoses, and, in turn, to be admitted to inpatient facilities and compulsorily detained there; there are concerns too about over-representation in the criminal justice system. Little such work has been done with adolescents. AIMS: To determine the proportion of young people from ethnic minorities admitted to one UK specialist medium secure hospital unit for adolescents and describe their diagnoses. METHODS: Data were extracted from the case records of all 61 young people admitted to this unit at any time between 1 April 1995 and 31 March 2002. RESULTS: Inpatients from ethnic minority backgrounds were significantly over-represented when compared with National Census data. This was mainly accounted for by inpatients from Black African (11%) and Black Caribbean backgrounds (8%). There were, however, no within unit differences in final diagnoses between the ethnic groups. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Our findings confirm both a high overall proportion of young people from ethnic minorities using a national medium secure hospital service and considerable ethnic diversity within that. They are discussed in the context of one relevant national government initiative for improving responses to minority groups.