The Right to Treatment: A Symposium. Donald S. Burris (Ed.). New York:  Springer, 1969.  ix+229 pp.

This is a report on a symposium that was organized to examine the legal treatment of mentally ill criminals. The discussion centered on the fact that courts and legislatures have begun to question the appropriateness of locking up mentally ill criminals, alcoholics, and drug addicts without concurrent attempts at rehabilitation. Opinion in legal circles is asserting a “Right to Treatment” for offenders who are judged irresponsible or unable to stand trial by reason of insanity and subsequently are committed to mental hospitals. Prisons and jails are increasingly looked at more as psychiatric treatment facilities for all offenders rather than conveyors of punishment, according to the editor in his Preface.

The panel consisted of jurists, psychiatrists, and, following current trends, one institutionalized patient. The majority of the panel favored recognition of the “Right to Adequate Treatment.” Several of the jurists presented cases of successful habeas corpus petitions on behalf of individuals who had been confined for many years in hospitals without treatment. Among these cases were several psychopaths, one “neglected minor” who was deaf and mute, and several alcoholics who had been accused of minor offenses. The tenor of these decisions was that commitment to a mental hospital constituted indefinite incarceration without due process of law unless it was accompanied by therapeutic treatment. Several court decisions awarded large sums to mental patients as compensation, in one case for “false imprisonment and the physical injury, moral degradation and mental anguish brought about by the long incarceration due to the lack of psychiatric care.” Several of the panel members encouraged litigation as a means of preventing such cases in the future and also as a way of dramatizing the inability of many state hospitals to provide any treatment for any patient, voluntary or not, due to lack of facilities and trained staff.

A few participants, however, raised problems in conne