Personality and Dangerousness: Genealogies of Antisocial Personality Disorder

Personality and Dangerousness traces the history of the category of antisocial personality disorder. In the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings, Dunblane or the schoolyard killings in America, communities try to come to terms with private and public trauma and there is a need to understand what kind of person can commit such terrible acts. The problem of how to understand dangerousness often centres on the role of the mental health and criminal justice systems and it is from the intersection of these two institutions that the categorisation of dangerous persons has emerged.