This paper focuses on a brief literature review centred in some concepts that mediate health and the legal deprivation of freedom. It integrates a broader research work within the PhD in psychology, which concentrates on the behaviours which interfere with the health of a population living in a prisional establishment, i.e. prisoners who are serving imprisonment sentences and mental patients serving safety and treatment measures. We believe the structured psychological interview is one of the evaluation instruments that will allow us to access those behaviours. Nevertheless, before approaching this kind of instrument, we consider appropriate to define some concepts that were the basis of their construction, such as freedom vs legal deprivation of freedom, able-to-stand-trial vs not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity (according to the Portuguese legal system), risk behaviours and patterns within and outside the norm.
Health care policy; Risk behaviours; Prisoners; Freedom; Choice behavior
