Care of the Mentally Disordered Offender in the Community. Edited By Alec Buchanan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002. 334 pp. £29.50 (pb). ISBN 0 19263058-X

Alec Buchanan has assembled a high-class list of contributors for this book. His brief preface explains both its strength and weakness. He expresses surprise at ‘the degree to which the contributors have noted the same things and interpreted them differently’. He chose not to intervene because ‘both within disciplines and across them, this is a subject where a range of ideas have currency’. I think that he is wrong. He should have been a more active conductor. The ensemble of solo artists (sociologists, policy gurus, psychiatrists, psychologists and lawyers) from the UK, USA and Australia has produced a series of learned essays (and here I include Professor Mullen's introduction) but I found the absence of structure irritating.

I do not mean to be harsh, another reader might disagree with my analysis, but by the end of the book I sat back and wondered what it was really about! Professor Mullen draws together most of the contributions under the risk assessment and risk management umbrella. Perhaps the care of the mentally disordered offender in the community can be distilled down to risk assessment and risk management, but the subject of the book is, I believe, larger than this. For example, the chapter ‘Society, madness and control’, written by Nikolas Rose, a professor of sociology, is much more wide-ranging. Similarly, Alec Buchanan, in his chapter ‘Who does what? The relationship between generic and forensic psychiatric services’, is particularly challenging in questioning the role of specialist services for the community care of mentally disordered offenders. It is right to ask such questions, but where is the historical context? Why has forensic psychiatry developed as the speciality it is today? Although Buchanan does not address this issue, an excellent contribution from Ian Jewesbury & Andrew McCulloch in part answers this question.

It is deeply unsatisfying that the contributors were allowed to go about their work without direction and I am disappointed that I cannot be more positive about the book as a whole. Nevertheless, I do recommend that all of those involved in the care of mentally disordered offenders consider this book. Most of the individual chapters are excellent and thought-provoking, offering interesting perspectives on this form of community care. It is a volume that I suggest you dip into rather than read from cover to cover.