Call for better prison psychiatric treatment

The Mental Health Commission has recommended the establishment of regional centres to treat prisoners suffering from mental illnesses.

In its response to the publication of the Criminal Law Insanity Bill, the commission said prisons should never be used as treatment centres for the mentally ill.

The Bill only allows the judiciary to commit mentally ill defendants to designated centres.

John Owens, chairman of the Mental Health Commission, said: "People who are in prison have as much right as anybody else to have adequate psychiatric services and those services ought to be provided not in the context of prisons, but in the same way and same place as people who are not prisoners."