Abstract: The Forensic Experts' Contribution to Prolong Court Ordered Detention of Sexual Offenders

The paper will reflect the tremendous increase of the average duration of court ordered psychiatric detention of offenders as well as the even greater increase of the number of detainees during the last 20 years in Germany. Specifically, it will focus on the role of independent psychiatric prognostic evaluations that were performed in one of the German states every three years since 1985 and are meanwhile obligatory every five years in all german States. It will be shown that average duration of the detention is expanded and patients get more and more severe diagnoses  when regular independent psychiatric opinions are required.

Friedemann Pfäfflin, Prof. Dr. med., founding president of IATSO, had his training as psychiatrist at the University Clinic in Hamburg, Germany, where he worked for appr. 20 years in the Department of Sex Research before, in 1992, moving to Ulm University. There, he was head of the Department of Forensic Psychotherapy until 2010.