Killing Off Our Mentally Ill in Our Prisons

Killing Off Our Mentally Ill in Our Prisons
This post was written by Ed Kent on 15 January, 2007 (08:10) | All News

Tragically too many Americans (and our medical insurance companies which do all that they can to avoid mental illness coverage) see mental illness (as in days of yore) as a form of demonic possession to be punished rather than a medical condition to be treated. I just sent the following to my StudentConcerns list:

FYI. Students who wrote on the ‘mentally ill in prison’ for the final exam question in my Ethics and Society Classes.

For the benefit of others, the U.S. (now holding 1/4 of the world’s imprisoned in its jails) began closing down its mental hospitals and replacing them with prisons several decades ago — particularly in NY many of these are kept in solitary confinement cells which drive even sane people over the edge. Yes, some of my students have been hit with this, e.g. one bi-polar young orthodox woman who had an arm smashed in Rikers when she was deprived of her medications there — shortly thereafter we learned that the private corporation supposed to supply them was skimming and not delivering (under Giuliani). Many of those imprisoned, incidentally, are there for non-violent drug offenses — said to be for some attempts to self-medicate for depression which impacts about 1/5 of our population at some point in our lives. Ed Kent]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15harcourt.html?th&emc=th

Op-Ed Contributor
The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars

By BERNARD E. HARCOURT
Published: January 15, 2007

Chicago

Last August, a prison inmate in Jackson, Mich. — someone the authorities described as “floridly psychotic” — died in his segregation cell, naked, shackled to a concrete slab, lying in his own urine, scheduled for a mental health transfer that never happened. Last month in Florida, the head of the state’s social services department resigned abruptly after having been fined $80,000 and is facing criminal contempt charges for failing to transfer severely mentally ill jail inmates to state hospitals.

Ten days ago, the Supreme Court agreed to determine when mentally ill death row inmates should be considered so deranged that their execution would be constitutionally impermissible. The case involves a 48-year-old Navy veteran who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. In the decade leading up to the crime he was hospitalized 14 times for severe mental illness.

According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year.

Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

The graph on the left — based on statistics from the federal Census Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services and Bureau of Justice Statistics — shows the aggregate rate of institutionalization per 100,000 adults in the United States from 1928 to 2000, as well as the disaggregated trend lines for mental hospitalization on the one hand and state and federal prisons on the other.

The numbers include only state and county mental hospitals. There were many more kinds of mental institutions at mid-century, ones for “mental defectives and epileptics” and the mentally retarded, psychiatric wards in veterans hospitals, as well as “psychopathic” and private mental hospitals. If we include residents of those facilities, from 1935 to 1963 the United States consistently institutionalized at rates well above 700 per 100,000 adults — with highs of 778 in 1939 and 786 in 1955. It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

But the graph poses a number of troubling questions: Why did we diagnose deviance in such radically different ways over the course of the 20th century? Do we need to be imprisoning at such high rates, or were we right, 50 years ago, to hospitalize instead? Why were so many women hospitalized? Why have they been replaced by young black men? Have both prisons and mental hospitals included large numbers of unnecessarily incarcerated individuals?

Whatever the answers, the pendulum has swung too far — possibly off its hinges.

It would be naïve, today, to address any of these questions without also considering the impact of imprisonment on crime. One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results.

The effect on crime may not depend on whether the institution is a mental hospital or a prison. Even from a crime-fighting perspective, then, it is time to rethink our prison and mental health policies. A lot more work must be done before proposing answers to those troubling questions. But the first step is to realize that we have been wildly erratic in our approach to deviance, mental health and the prison.

Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

http://www.bloggernews.net/13854

Police kill a lot them on the streets too.

i have a friend who worked at a state school for the retarded/mentally disabled/clients..the description changes every few years..well the state of illinois and cook county decided to start sending intercity kids to this place. my friend realized that the state would soon be using the school to house kids they can`t send to prison or foster homes. with in 15 years the school was closed and the people were either dumped onto the streets of chicago or other institutions such as nursing homes. the care for them here has now become small group homes which seems to be a much better solution. the state school facility was converted into a prison with a special unit for mentally ill prisoners.
prisons were meant to house criminals not the mentally disabled. i`ve seen some people who should not be incarcerated in a prison setting because they were clearly disabled. prisons only make the problem worse and these people someday will return to the very streets that they came from..