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Background: As in many European countries, Finnish psychiatric services experienced a rapid process of deinstitutionalization in the 1990s. In recent decades, the decrease in numbers of psychiatric hospital beds has in several countries been found to be linked with increasing criminality among severely mentally ill individuals. It has been concluded that deinstitutionalization could be the main reason for this development. Aim: To investigate whether the prevalence of severely mentally ill persons to prison is a growing trend also in Finland. Methods: We searched for the annual data in electronic case files of all prisoners about the ICD-10 diagnostic group of the most severe psychotic disorders. We also searched for the comorbid substance use disorders. Psychotic disorders due to substance abuse only were excluded from this study. Results: During the years 2005-2016, a rapid 10-fold increase in psychotic disorders has occurred in Finnish prisons. In 2016, 185 prisoners (5.9% of all Finnish prisoners) were diagnosed as having a psychotic disorder that was not induced by substance abuse. The causes of this dramatic change are unclear. Comorbid substance abuse disorders were detected in only 39.5% of these prisoners and therefore substance abuse can only partly explain the increasing criminality of the severely mentally ill persons. 80.5% of psychotic disorders were diagnosed in Psychiatric Hospital for prisoners and 19.5% in prison policlinic services. Conclusion: Trans-institutionalization has become a serious challenge for the Finnish criminal justice and mental health systems. Further studies are needed to detect the causes of this change. More specialized services for severely mentally ill persons are needed both in the community psychiatry and also inside the prison services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No Brasil sempre se discute sobre o número de representantes na Câmara Federal, com indicações de sub ou sobre-representatividade. Esta discussão tem valor político e econômico, pois uma parcela dos recursos públicos é definida nesta instância, sendo influenciada pelo efetivo poder estadual, que pode ser mensurado pelo índice de Banzhaf. Uma proposta, sugerida por Penrose, é analisada para as UF's e regiões brasileiras. A aplicação mostra que, tanto para o atual sistema quanto para o proposto, a região Sudeste é a mais favorecida. Em relação aos Estados, os mais desenvolvidos e populosos possuem maior poder de voto em ambas situações.In Brazil there are always discussions about the number of representatives in the Federal Camera, with indications of sub or super representativeness. This discussion has political and economic value because an amount of the public resources is defined in this body and it can be linked to the effective power of the states, which can be measured by the Banzhaf index. A proposal, suggested by Penrose, is analyzed for Brazilian States and Regions. Application shows that, for the current as for the Penrose system, the most favored region is the Southeast. From the viewpoint of States, it is noticed that are those more developed and populous that possess larger voting power in both situations.

The investigation of the relationship between the sizes of the mental health population and the prison population, outlined in Penrose's Law, has received renewed interest in recent decades. The problems that arise in the course of the deinstitutionalization have repeatedly drawn attention to this issue. This article presents methodological challenges to the examination of Penrose's Law and retrospectively reviews historical data from empirical studies. A critical element of surveys is the sampling method; longitudinal studies seem appropriate here. The relationship between the numbers of psychiatric beds and the size of the prison population is inverse in most cases. However, a serious failure is that almost all of the data were collected in countries historically belonging to a Christian or Jewish cultural community. Only very limited conclusions can be drawn from these sparse and non-comprehensive data: a reduction in the number of psychiatric beds seems to be accompanied by increases in the numbers of involuntary admissions and forensic treatments and an accumulation of mentally ill persons in prisons. A kind of transinstitutionalization is currently ongoing. A pragmatic balance between academic epidemiological numbers and cultural narratives should be found in order to confirm or refute the validity of Penrose's Law. Unless comprehensive research is undertaken, it is impossible to draw any real conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Penrose described an observation in 1939, according to which an inverse relationship between the size of prison populations and the number of psychiatric beds existed. The purpose of this article was to investigate the validity of this statement for Hungary. The national data between 1989 and 2017 for 25 variables were extracted from the official reports of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. The number of psychiatric beds decreased by 33%, while the number of prisoners increased by about 50%. At the same time, the number of mentally ill patients under compulsive treatment was low, but showed a slight, statistically significant increase. Variables measuring similar feature, for example, the psychiatric characteristics (alcoholics registered, suicide rate, number of hospital beds, welfare home inmates) are variables consistently moving in one direction or the other that may allow finding appropriate indicators of and explanations for the phenomena. An example is the number of psychiatric beds showing a parallel decrease to the numbers of total hospital beds, registered alcoholics, out-patient clinics for children, and suicide rate, and just the opposite direction with forensic settling, involuntary admissions, and welfare home inmates. Similarly, crimes, criminals, homicides, and prisoners can also be grouped. Correlation does not mean a cause and effect relationship, therefore, at the current state of knowledge the connection among variables is not clear in all the cases. To sum up, Hungarian statistical data for three decades support Penrose's original observation on psychiatric beds and prison population, while the Penrose's statement on the inverse relationship between the number of crimes and of psychiatric beds is not supported. However, until deeper relationships are explored, aggregation of variables into few factors seems impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]