Effect of psychotropic drugs on aggression in a prison setting.

The authors, working in a maximum security correctional institution, had noted an apparent increase in acts of aggression by inmates when these inmates were on psychotropic drugs. A retrospective study was therefore carried out to attempt to correlete and prove or disprove this hypothesis. It was found that violent, aggressive incidents occurred significantly more frequently in Inmates who were on psychotropic medication than when these inmates were not on psychotropic drugs. Of these, antianxiety agents (diazepam in 81 percent of the cases), appeared to be most implicated, with 3.6 times as many acts of aggression occurring when inmates were on these drugs. For the other classes of psychotropic medication the aggressive incident rate was double the rate of those on no psychotropic medication.