Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Mental illness is invading our prison systems. It is three times more likely for an
individual that has a mental illness to be placed into a prison or jail rather than a mental health
facility.i Roughly 40 percent of those who suffer from a mental illness will wind up in a
prison, jail, or correctional facility.ii The National
three times more Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) put out that nearly 2
million individuals who are booked into jails each year
likely for an individual suffer from a mental health problem.iii The real problem is
that has a mental illness that these numbers are not changing any time soon.
to be placed into a prison
or jail Budget Reconciliation Act basically took
over and cut most of the spending for non-
Where It All Started defense appropriations.v Meaning, he cut
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter the spending that President Carter had just
proposed to the Congress the Mental Health put in place, and put it towards military
Systems Act which stated that it seeks to needs. MotherJones stated that this act had
assure that the chronically mentally ill no decreased federal funded mental health
longer feel the cruel alternative of facilities by 30 percent.vi
unnecessary institutionalization or Since the deinstitutionalization, the
inadequate care in the community.iv In mentally ill needed to find other options.
other words, President Carter proposed to Within these options, they found the prison
fund mental health institutions. He wanted system. PBS quoted Alex Briscoe, the health
to give federal money to these programs and director for Alameda County in northern
hospitals to keep them alive. It was in 1981 California, Weve, frankly, criminalized
when President Ronald Reagan repealed this the mentally ill, and used local jails as de
act. His proposition of the 1981 Omnibus facto mental health institutions.vii The truth
of the matter is that there are three times
more individuals with mental illnesses
incarcerated in the United States than in
hospitals.viii
Weve criminalized
the mentally ill
The United States Correctional
Facilities are not equipped to help those with
mental illnesses. Huffington Post speculated
on this further by stating that many of the
mentally ill inmates get sent to solitary
confinement, for their safety and the safety
of other inmates.ix Unfortunately, solitary
confinement is considered by many for those who are currently imprisoned and
individuals as painful torture. Youre suffering. It is important for you and me and
alone for days, weeks, months with no everybody else. The importance lies within
outside interaction whatsoever. It can the community. Individuals with mental
mentally and physically harm you. And in illnesses come out of prison worse than
these acts of keeping those and others safe, when they entered. Nobody would willingly
due to a mental illness, the system is arrest somebody with cancer, would they?
increasing their likelihood of a fatality. So why would a mental illness be different?