Bruce Arrigo. The Contours of Psychiatric Justice: A Postmodern Critique of Mental Illness, Criminal Insanity, and the Law. New York:  Garland Publishing. 1996.

This book fits in a class with only a few books that are published in criminology/criminal justice each year—those that are non-textbooks and non-literature reviews and that are thought provoking. Not surprisingly, many of the books in this genre come from the same publisher, Garland Publishing, in its “Current Issues in Criminal Justice” series.

This book provides history, substance, and understanding to an issue that has been the topic of a great deal of debate in the past twenty or so years: legal issues of the mentally ill. Since the time in America when we began large-scale deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, legal battles involving the mentally ill and their involvement of the criminal justice system have steadily increased.

Postmodern thought is, perhaps, the most appropriate method of dealing with this issue. Who gets classified as mentally ill, how those classifications change, how the criminal justice system (particularly the correctional system) deals with those that are classified as mentally ill (or those that the law argues should be classified as such) are best addressed by the deconstruction of and attention to communication, language, and symbols of postmodernism. As such, this book sets the stage for those who would take on this line of research, thinking, and action.

The primary focus of the book is a postmodern and semiotic critique of the areas of mental illness, civil commitment, and criminal insanity as it crosses between the fields of mental health and criminal justice. As stated in the book, Arrigo attempts to examine the “overlapping effects of clinicolegal discourse and multiple meanings (signs) contained in appellate case and statutory law affecting the mentally ill.” By examining the words, both spoken and inferred, in the law and in the treatment of the mentally ill, Arrigo describes in broad terms how people are labeled and then treated within the mental health field and the criminal justice system.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to