(Nov. 17, 2015) People suffering with severe mental illness are criminalized at an alarming rate in our country. This year alone has brought many tragic encounters between corrections staff and inmates with mental illness. Here are just a few examples:
Natasha McKenna was arrested early this year on a charge of assaulting a police officer while suffering a psychotic break due to untreated schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The 37-year-old mother was taken to the Fairfax County jail in Virginia and had been there for about a week before she was shocked four times with a Taser during an altercation with jail deputies. McKenna lost consciousness following the struggle and died four days later, on Feb. 7.
A twenty-five-year-old diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Keaton Farris was passed through four jails while awaiting a bed at the overburdened Washington state psychiatric hospital. Farris died of dehydration and malnutrition while behind bars. “Keaton died because he was labeled a behavioral problem, a danger, and an inconvenience,” wrote the Daily Herald. ”He died while he was in a mental health crisis and unable to care for himself. He needed help from the people paid to care for him in the jail.”
Arrested in April for stealing five dollars’ worth of junk food from a 7-Eleven, 24-year-old Jamycheal Mitchell was ordered to a state psychiatric hospital to be treated for paranoid schizophrenia. But like an increasing number of the mentally ill, he sat in the Hampton Roads regional jail in Portsmouth, Virginia for months as he waited for a bed to open. While incarcerated, Mitchell dropped a horrifying 65 pounds. Then, on August 19, 2015, Mitchell’s severely emaciated body was found unresponsive on the floor of his cell. He had starved to death while in jail custody.
An inmate with mental illness at the Santa Clara County Jail in California, 31-year-old Michael James Tyree died in late August at the hands of three correctional officers in what Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith called a “brutal murder.” According to reports, three deputies entered Tyree's single-person cell and viciously beat him. The county medical examiner-coroner said Tyree died of internal bleeding from multiple blunt force injuries.
The criminalization of mental illness can no longer be ignored.
Yesterday, we launched our first-ever, crowd-fundraising campaign to end the criminalization of serious mental illness across the country. The Treatment Advocacy Center is one of the only organizations giving a voice to the voiceless and working to fix our broken mental health system.
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