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Judicial Decisions in Civil Commitment: Facts, Attitudes, and Psychiatric Recommendations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Virginia Aldigé Hiday
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Abstract

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Regression analysis is applied to civil commitment decisions to evaluate the importance of psychiatric opinion, externally visible “facts,” and judges' attitudes. Indices were constructed of evidence of dangerousness, based on information presented at court hearings, and of judges' attitudes toward psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and the mentally ill, based on their responses to Likert type items. Additional variables include respondent's prior commitment status, diagnosis, court behavior, race, sex, age, and family caring. The analysis suggests that “facts” and psychiatric opinion but not judges' attitudes are significant influences on commitment decisions.

Type
Research Note
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , 1983 , pp. 517 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant #5 R01 MH 30548 from the Center for Crime and Delinquency Studies of the Alcohol Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Thanks are owed to the judges, counsel, and clerks, without whose cooperation this study would not have been possible. I also wish to thank Elizabeth M. Suval, Richard Lempert, and Jeffrey C. Leiter for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Richard T. Campbell for his assistance with the logit analysis.

References

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