(Jan. 9, 2013) “It appears we have returned to the early 19th Century when mentally ill persons filled our jails and prisons.”
So writes Maria A. Brooks, corporate clinical coordinator for a firm that provides mental and other health services to inmates, in a Miami Herald op-ed. “At least forty percent of individuals with serious mental illnesses have been in jail or prison at some point in their lives” (“Jail is no place for the mentally ill” Jan. 8).
Brooks writes that mentally ill detainees also “stay longer in the correctional system” because they find it difficult to follow jail and prison rules.
“Some may say this is not worrisome because while housed in a correctional facility, the individual is receiving treatment and is kept off the streets,” wrote the official. "However, as any person working in a correctional facility will tell you, jails and prisons are not created to be mental hospitals.”
Our incarceration system was never built to handle people who are mentally ill, and Brooks addresses the role of treatment in finding a solution to the problem. “By ensuring access to treatment and recovery, individuals with mental illness will be more productive members of society and will not be overrepresented in our correctional systems.”
We wholeheartedly agree.
In few places is deinstitutionalization more evident than in our criminal justice system, where jails and prisons have replaced hospitals as the institutions housing the most psychiatric patients. Until we stop eliminating public psychiatric beds and start making treatment more available before individuals with severe mental illness become inmates, this will remain the case.
Read more about how America’s jails and prisons have become surrogate psychiatric hospitals for thousands of individuals with mental illness.
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