Let’s be clear: it’s not about coddling criminals or letting anyone off without justice having been served. That said, a triptych of recent reports reveal some unpleasant truths about the blossoming nexus of mental illness and the American criminal justice system.
First, there are the glaring statistics. Chief among them are this gem reported by National Public Radio: the three largest inpatient psychiatric facilities in the country are the Los Angeles County Jail, Rikers Island in New York City and Cook County Jail in Illinois.
As Matthew T. Mangino, a member of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, wrote in his editorial for the Crime report, “Jails and prisons are America’s de facto psychiatric hospitals.”
Backing up this contention, Jamie Fellner, the director of the U.S. Program for Human Rights Watch, just published an article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review in which she observes that there may be as many as 300,000 mentally ill inmates in American prisons. Given that there are just over 2 million total inmates in American prisons, that’s a significant proportion of the entire U. S. correctional population. Moreover, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 16 percent of all adult inmates in state prisons and local jails are mentally ill.
The more cynical among us might respond with something akin to “So what? People don’t go to prison for jay-walking.” True enough. Most residents have earned their spot. Even so, multiple sources concur that the prison mental health crisis in our country mirrors the poor state of mental health services among the general public. As Fellner states, “Left untreated and unstable, people with serious mental illnesses — particularly those who are also poor, homeless, and suffering from untreated alcoholism or drug addiction—may break the law and then enter the criminal justice system. The failure of mental health systems has led to what some have called the criminalizing of the mentally ill.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Even if we accept that most of the people in prison did something for which they deserve to be in prison, we must acknowledge that mentally ill persons — even if they are also criminals — often have a substantially more brutal and punitive stay in prison. Criminals need to be punished. No one disputes that, but as a civilized people, we should want whatever punishment we mete out to be comprehended by the person being punished.
As Fellner states, “Mentally ill prisoners… do not have the same capacity to comply with prison rules as do other prisoners. If they have schizophrenia or other serious ‘Axis I’ disorders, psychotic symptoms, or other serious dysfunction, inmates may suffer from delusions, hallucinations, chaotic thinking, or serious disruptions of consciousness, memory, and perception of the environment.”
As a consequence of this inability to comply with prison rules, a substantial portion of inmates are held in solitary confinement are mentally ill — a confinement condition shown to exacerbate problems such as those listed above.
Apart from the humanitarian aspects of the problem there are the financial burdens. A University of South Florida study found that the highest users of criminal justice and mental health services in Miami-Dade County were 97 people, all diagnosed primarily with schizophrenia.
As Florida Judge Steve Leifman told NPR, “Over a five-year period, these 97 individuals were arrested almost 2,200 times and spent 27,000 days in the Miami-Dade Jail. It cost the tax payers $13 million.”
This same dynamic can be found all over the country. Because we have failed to provide sufficient mental health services (and health care generally), people fall through the cracks and into the societal catch basin that is the criminal justice system. Just as we are beginning to recognize with education expenditures: either we pay for health care on the front or we’ll pay for prisons on the back. The difference being: One salvages people; The other just turns them into salvage.