A recent article said that Taichung Hong-en Hospital looked the other way while orderlies severely beat a 23-year-old patient surnamed Yang (楊), who was a ward of the state. This hospital has also been accused of allowing the sexual abuse of patients and engaging in insurance fraud. Seven of central Taiwan’s courts have announced that people who are wards of the state under guardianship or custody are to be admitted to this hospital for care.
In May, a man surnamed Chien (簡), who had been convicted of murder, had unsuccessfully attempted to apply for a psychiatric hospital to act as his guardian. He escaped from Nanguang Hospital in Keelung and was at large somewhere between Keelung and New Taipei City for four days before he was found and taken into custody. The court overseeing Chien’s case immediately sent him to Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-syuan Psychiatric Hospital — the nation’s only partial special judicial psychiatric hospital — for guardianship.
With the public’s rights and interests in mind, the government cannot waste more time. It must establish more special judicial psychiatric hospitals that can directly supervise patients like Chien.
In January 2022, the legislature passed amendments to the Criminal Code, Article 87 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Rehabilitative Disposition Execution Act (保安處分執行法) due to the frequent mistreatment and murders of some psychiatric hospital patients. Apart from the revision to the Code of Criminal Procedures and its temporary custodial placement system, the most important change was in the implementation of Article 87 — which was originally based on the German criminal code — adjusting the duration of state guardianship from five years to potentially indefinitely, although annual professional psychiatric evaluations are to be performed to decide whether patients with psychiatric disorders should be discharged, as part of upholding their human rights.
Taiwan seems to be going in the opposite direction. For decades, the revision of Article 87 on the extensions of custodial placement was delayed, and the code had gone unrevised.
To this day, even after a prolonged fight to pass the bill in 2022 and calls to create 480 special judicial psychiatric beds throughout the nation before next year, there are still only 30 beds nationwide — all of them at Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-syuan Psychiatric Hospital.
As for Chien, who was convicted of murder in May and not granted ward status, he was sent from Keelung to the Kaohsiung facility, more than 370km away.
Additionally, state ward placements are only carried out by district prosecutors’ offices through contractual commission by a hospital within the district’s jurisdiction. This system has several disadvantages, and there are several studies on the topic. The biggest findings are that treatments at different hospitals come out to an average monthly low-end cost of about NT$10,000 to NT$20,000 to a higher-end cost of about NT$80,000 to NT$90,000 per person.
There are also safety considerations when a psychiatric patient in criminal custody is mixed with the general patient population. The nation has also failed to set up regular evaluation mechanisms for custodial placements. No training mechanism exists for specialized judicial appraisals nor the integration of the criminal justice system into the nation’s psychiatric care network. It is lamentable that these issues have gone unaddressed.
Custody of criminals with psychiatric disorders needs to be frequently reflected in the improvement and implementation of the criminal justice system, with risk management and control serving as the foundation for secure custodial placements under the criminal code.
We cannot simply lean on long-term exploitation or limit the freedoms of criminals trying to earn merit. The government’s response must be to quickly establish specialized judicially appointed psychiatric facilities, and supportive services and mechanisms.
Chao Hsuey-wen is a lecturer at Soochow University and a doctoral candidate in Fu Jen Catholic University’s Department of Law.
Translated by Tim Smith
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