This article that is written by Ed Mclsaac, Susan Dolan and Lorraine derzins, on the website Smartjustice.ca/mental-ill explains the corrupt justice system when it come to the communities that have a somewhat big population of people with mental illness and the way police officers deal with and treat them when their having a break down or something they can’t control. They just throw them in a jail with no medical support or anything to help with their condition and when they act up in jail the correction officers just throw them in solitary confinement and just have them under watch in the cell. Instead the police officer can have the person sent to a mental illness center where they can be properly watched and treated. Ashley smith was thrown in jail at the age 13 for having mental illness related break down and sadly she took her own life because they treated her break down or episodes as bad behavior and her acting up, she couldn’t even control her what she did when she is having an episode and so she was punished for it. Due to the way she was treated for having a mental illness she thought she would rather not live then to be in jail with guards mistreating her. Ashley story is can be defined by using the words …show more content…
This is why I want to get into the correction field so when I work there and we have people with mental illness, I can try to help and make their lives a little bit better considering the fact there in jail. If I notice that a person should not be in jail and should be in a mental home I can try to them transferred so there able to get treated the right way and that would be the best part of the job because while I am able to keep people face and enforce the law, I am also able to help changes some one’s life and make things
As a result of the lack of regulation in state mental institutions, most patients were not just abused and harassed, but also did not experience the treatment they came to these places for. While the maltreatment of patients did end with the downsizing and closing of these institutions in the 1970’s, the mental health care system in America merely shifted from patients being locked up in mental institutions to patients being locked up in actual prisons. The funds that were supposed to be saved from closing these mental institutions was never really pumped back into treating the mentally ill community. As a result, many mentally ill people were rushed out of mental institutions and exposed back into the real world with no help where they ended up either homeless, dead, or in trouble with the law. Judges even today are still forced to sentence those in the latter category to prison since there are few better options for mentally ill individuals to receive the treatment they need. The fact that America, even today, has not found a proper answer to treat the mentally ill really speaks about the flaws in our
In the book Crazy in America by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, she illustrated examples of what people with mental illness endure every day in their encounters with the criminal justice system. Shayne Eggen, Peter Nadir, Alan Houseman and Joseph Maldonado are amongst those thousands or more people who are view as suspected when in reality they are psychotic who should be receiving medical assistance instead, of been thrown into prison. Their stories also show how our society has failed to provide some of its most vulnerable citizens and has allowed them to be treated as a criminals. All of these people shared a common similarity which is their experience they went through due to their illness.
Ashley Smith was a young girl that was placed in a juvenile detention centre at age 15 for throwing apples at a mail man. Her short sentence quickly extended into a life sentence because of so many infractions within the prison system. Ashley suffered from extreme mental health issues and was place in a psychiatric prison facility, however this facility was shown in the documentary to be corrupt and their actions with Ashley were extremely illegal. Furthermore, Ashley wasn’t given the proper help and treatment that she needed, instead she was physically and verbally abused by guards in the prison, and she ultimately passed away in the prison. Her death is still being debated about whether
Budget cuts in prison are affecting mental health care for prisoners. Budget cuts are eating away the funding for mental health care "police officers in Reno with mental health counselors to reach out to the mentally ill, whether they’ve committed crime, are a threat to themselves, or could be in the future ,and are Already starved for services, troubled citizens sometimes tumble into homelessness and alcoholism and tussle violently with police, who are usually ill-equipped to help them"(Kihmm). They will not be able to receive the proper medication they need. These inmates that are ill are just finding bad ways to not feel the sickness they have. Most of the ex cons just go back to jail, because of there mental illness. There untreated mental
Thousands of people statewide are in prisons, all for different reasons. However, the amount of mental illness within prisons seems to go unaddressed and ignored throughout the country. This is a serious problem, and the therapy/rehabilitation that prison systems have do not always help those who are mentally ill. Prison involvement itself can contribute to increased suicide (Hills, Holly). One ‘therapy’ that has increased throughout the years has been the use of solitary confinement, which has many negative effects on the inmates. When an inmate has a current mental illness, prior to entering into the prison, and it goes undiagnosed and untreated, the illness can just be worsened and aggravated.
Prior to taking this course, I generally believed that people were rightly in prison due to their actions. Now, I have become aware of the discrepancies and flaws within the Criminal Justice system. One of the biggest discrepancies aside from the imprisonment rate between black and white men, is mental illness. Something I wished we covered more in class. The conversation about mental illness is one that we are just recently beginning to have. For quite a while, mental illness was not something people talked about publicly. This conversation has a shorter history in American prisons. Throughout the semester I have read articles regarding the Criminal Justice system and mental illness in the United States. Below I will attempt to describe how the Criminal Justice system fails when they are encountered by people with mental illnesses.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and of that over sixty percent of jail inmates reported having a mental health issue and 316,000 of them are severely mentally ill (Raphael & Stoll, 2013). Correctional facilities in the United States have become the primary mental health institutions today (Adams & Ferrandino, 2008). This imprisonment of the mentally ill in the United States has increased the incarceration rate and has left those individuals medically untreated and emotionally unstable while in jail and after being released. Better housing facilities, medical treatment and psychiatric counseling can be helpful in alleviating their illness as well as upon their release. This paper will explore the increasing incarceration rate of the mentally ill in the jails and prisons of the United States, the lack of medical services available to the mentally ill, the roles of the police, the correctional officers and the community and the revolving door phenomenon (Soderstrom, 2007). It will also review some of the existing and present policies that have been ineffective and present new policies that can be effective with the proper resources and training. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate that the criminalization of the mentally ill has become a public health problem and that our policy should focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
Jasmine Beckford’s case is the oldest out of the three; in 1984 Jasmine died as a result of long-term abuse aged 4. In 1981 her and her younger sister suffered serious injuries and were paced with foster carers for six months. After this they were allowed back home with their mother on a trial basis as social services were meant to support them. During the last ten months of Jasmine’s life she was only seen once by social workers (Corby, 2006).
Several states authorize police officers to arrest mentally ill people who have not broken any law. It is argued that this process is a way to promote public order. Hospitals also transfer mentally ill patients to jail in order to deal with the overflow. It is not uncommon for children to be confined to criminal detention centers because there is a lack of facilities for severely mentally ill children. Relying on the criminal justice systems to be surrogate mental health systems conflicts with the basic notions of justice. (Aufderheide,
Critical to understanding the extent of the problem is a clear definition of mentally ill, “a person suffering from mental illness and, owing to that illness, there are reasonable grounds for believing that care, treatment or control of the person is necessary for the person’s own protection from serious harm, or for the protection of others from serious harm” [Mental Health Act 2007 (NSW)]. Noting that the statute specifies the ‘control’ of this group which adds to the notion that people with mental health problems are inherently more dangerous members of our society. Furthermore mental health problems within the prison system (inmate population) are estimated to be three to four times higher than in the general Australian popula...
When Deborah was only sixteen she became pregnant with her first child by Cheetah and boy she liked when she was younger. Cheetah and Deborah got married and then had their second child. Deborah became very unhappy in the marriage because Cheetah started drinking and doing drugs. He started abusing Deborah. Cheetah pushed Deborah so much she almost killed him if it wasn’t for Bobbette. Deborah’s brothers Sonny and Lawrence were doing well except for Joe. Joe was another case. Joe went to the military, and the family was hoping that would do him good; but he came out worse than when he went in. Joe was threatened and beaten up by a boy named Ivy. Joe was in so much rage he went and stabbed him and killed him. Joe eventually turned himself in to the law, was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced fifteen years in prison.
We as a society have been forced to think that everyone in jail deserves what they get, we over look the fact that some have a mental illness that they can’t control over their actions .Taken all we have learned, this information has let me see what goes on, not only in jail, but in society. In this article it talks about people who have mental illness being treated improperly in jail and the rate of suicides is high do to the fact that people are not able to care for himself and feel that they do not belong there. When looking at videos in class I was able to understand why some people do what, some people hurt others and themselves without their control. The main issue of the article is that people with mental illnesses are being sent to jail for crimes that they may not have control over as they are sent to jail they are treated inappropriate by other inmates and guards that don't know how to handle them. The fact that some inmates ha...
In 1959, nearly 559,000 mentally ill patients were housed in state mental hospitals (Lamb, 1998). There are 15,000 mentally ill inmates incarcerated in the New York system. The nationwide amount of mentally ill inmates is almost 800,000. I do not think that the correction system is set up to accommodate mentally handicapped offenders. Thomas Szasz has argued that “today we use the term mental illness to explain behaviors we do not understand, even if the behavior is not caused by a disease of the brain.”
Although there have been some cases of which the person committing the crime has mental health issues due to trauma or bad up bringing in the family area one of these cases was Mr S who was a 22-year-old physics university student he was very isolated but doing great academically, he was an only child and was very introvert with few friends at school his parents divorced when he was 3, after the divorce he hardly saw his father. He had a very close relationship with his mother growing up, sharing a bed with her until puberty. The mother struggled with depression
...situation under control, which often involves the use of force. Speaking from firsthand knowledge of working with the Connecticut Department of Corrections, I notice that the popular method mental health staff uses is to medicate these individuals then they will start to provide physical treatment such as group sessions and education. This seems to work as the inmates slow down. However I have seen where some seem to improve to a point where their mental level drops and they are return to the general prison population, but shortly after they return to their original state. This will then lead me to question what happens once they are release from prison. The question is answered both from this research and my personal observation, with the inmate simply returning to prison. Without adequate community resources it is my belief that this cycle will never be broken.