Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Very few of the 80,000 people imprisoned annually in this country for violent crime receive any psychiatric help. Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashmoor maximum security hospitals which do provide psychiatric treatment do not have enough places to meet the demand. Meanwhile, justice can only deal crudely and inadequately with the majority of these offenders. In this film Joan Bakewell tries to clarify the concept of "psychopath" and finds that the language used to describe the state of mind of disturbed and violent offenders belongs more to morality than to medicine.