Mental Illnesses

The video focused on one prison in particular. In this prison, there is proper medication, psychiatrists, and nurses. The main issue with this is that most of the mentally ill inmates have never had that level of proper care, so the prison system is hard to leave. However, the prison system is not designed to provide mental health treatment. It is supposed to provide community safety and security. As the video progressed, it stated the routines of the staff that is employed within the prison. When acute care is required, the inmates are put into the infirmary where they can be given the attention they need. However, providing effective care in a prison is described to be quite difficult. Many mentally ill individuals become extremely depressed, hopeless, and suicidal. They may also result in self-harm acts, delusions, and hallucinations. The video stated that obtaining parole is quite difficult for mentally ill inmates. If they are lucky enough to be released, they are sent out with two weeks of medication. On the down side, most do not receive the services they require and that usually results in them committing another crime and ending back in jail or

In early years of the last century, housing mentally individuals in local jails or prisons was seen as inhumane and a reform movement led by Dorothea Dix began. This led to the building of mental hospitals. It was once believed that mentally ill individuals deserved to be treated and not punished. However, deinstitutionalization happened which was the emptying of state mental hospitals due to overcrowding and deterioration as well as the introduction of effective anti-psychotic medications and increased funding for the establishment of mental health centers. By the early 1970’s, it was becoming evident that the emptying of the state mental hospitals turned many prisons throughout the U.S into institutions. Despite this clear evidence, deinstitutionalization continues even to this day. The mentally ill, left with few resources, largely turned to petty crime, ending up in prison because there were no other better alternatives.

Each year approximately two million individuals with serious mental illness are booked into jails (National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2015). Majority of these inmates need instance from a professional caretaker or treatment center, rather than being considered “criminals” (Honberg, 2015). The correctional justice system plays an important role on mental health illness in today’s society.

Currently, a large percentage of those that are incarcerated suffer from some sort of mental illness. These inmates often fall through the cracks of preexisting mental health systems. According to a guide released by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (1993):

Each day vast amounts of people with mental disorders are being cycled through the criminal justice system. A recent study shows that approximately twenty percent of prisoners have a mental illness, and out of all of the mentally ill people alive, forty percent of them will serve some sort of jail time in their lifetime. In recent studies, it has also appeared that individuals being incarcerated have more severe types of mental illness, including psychotic disorders and major mood disorders than they did in the past. In fact, according to the American Psychiatric Association, between two and four percent of all inmates in state prisons are estimated to have a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, thirteen to nineteen percent have severe

Once released from an institution a mentally ill person, without the support of the community and much needed medication, might find themselves feeling very scared and threatened by interactions with the community. This leads us to another problem, which is crime and the mentally ill. About one thousand people in the U.S. are murdered by severely mentally ill people who are not receiving treatment. These killings are about 5% of all homicides nationwide, and help show once again how important it

This is unacceptable and a major issue in a broken criminal justice system. Diagnosed mentally ill patients should not be in prison, they need help that only a mental health facility can offer them. There is a difference between being mentally ill and being a criminal. It is no secret that the state has used the prison system as a dumping ground for the mentally ill. Common sense would lead an observer to conclude that a prison environment is not the best place for a person who is suffering from mental illness.

As stated by Mental Health America (MHA), “On any given day, between 300,000 and 400,000 people with mental illnesses are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the United States, and more than 500,000 people with mental illnesses are under correctional control in the community”. Mental Health Treatment in Correctional Facilities policy was put in to place on March 7, 2015 due to the ignored rights to mental health medical services that incarcerated individuals face. The policy sets a standard to how incarcerated individuals are to be treated, and protects the rights of the vulnerable individuals.

Mental illnesses have always been treated differently than physical illnesses. Physical illnesses are given more importance than mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. While those with physical injuries are told to seek help immediately, so often the only advice those who suffer from mental illnesses receive are to “get over it”. The mentally ill deserve just as much help and attention as those physically ill. Furthermore, it is wrong to incarcerate the mentally ill in prisons because they do not receive the sufficient amount of help that they need there.

Severely mentally ill people do not belong in jail. Because there is no room for additional patients in state mental health facilities, they cannot treat new patients, meaning dozens of severely mentally ill people are having to languish in jail. These people need treatment, and the jail cannot provide

After the “deinstitutionalization” of the mental hospitals in the United States during the 1960s there has been a great increase in the amount of persons with serious mental illness incarcerate in jails and prisons (Torrey et al., 2014, p. 6). The incarceration of a mental ill person is inhumane and should be illegal. This action not only causes a deterioration of the individual that is suffering from the illness but causes problems with other inmates, the jail and prison staff, and the public. The inability to provide the proper treatment to these subjects through the criminal justice system is an emotional and financial burden for all parties involved. Mentally ill persons who have said to committed crimes should

Society’s views about the mentally ill have helped shape the criminalization of their every move. On any day there are around 283,000 people with severe mental illness currently incarcerated in federal and state prisons. In contrast, there are around only 70,000 mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals

The United States criminal justice system has been continuously increasing incarceration among individuals who suffer from a sever mental illness. As of 2007 individuals with severe mental illness were over twice as likely to be found in prisons than in society (National Commission of Correctional Health Care, 2002, as cited in Litschge &Vaughn, 2009). The offenses that lead to their commitment in a criminal facility, in the majority of cases, derive from symptoms of their mental illness instead of deviant behavior. Our criminal justice system is failing those who would benefit more from the care of a psychiatric rehabilitation facility or psychiatric hospital by placing them in correctional facilities or prisons.

Mass murders are easy to apprehend because they rarely leave the scene of their crime, either because they commit suicide after the killings or because they stay long enough to be detected.

The article entitled Police Encounters Involving Citizens With Mental Illness: Use of Resources and Outcomes is a paper that studies 6,128 police interventions in Montreal, Québec, Canada. The main objective of the paper was to compare the characteristics of police interventions with individuals who had mental illness and those were not mentally ill. The motivation behind this hypothesis was that the authors had noted that there was little research done about the use of resources in police interventions with those with mental illness, although there was an abundance of research compiled about the arrest rate after police intervention of those with mental illness. The two things known about the use of intervention with those who are