In the book Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of our Criminalized Mentally Ill, Mary Beth Pfeiffer argues that the government has failed America's mentally ill population. She shows how, after the closing and downsizing of many mental hospitals, there have not been sufficient programs to take care of the mentally ill and help them live normal lives. Instead, these people often relapse and end up in jail, where their psychotic outbursts are punished harshly, exacerbating their illnesses. The author presents six anecdotes of mentally ill people suffering due to stays in prison or encounters with the police. In each case, she first gives a background on the person's life, then tells the story of how he or she first began getting into legal trouble, and then describes the events leading up to the incident and the incident itself. Finally, she …show more content…
The author uses logos by outlining step-by-step how the police or the correctional officers treated the inmate. She points out all of the times when something went wrong and explains why this had a negative effect and how it could have been avoided. Using this strategy, she proves that the police or correctional officers, the authorities, and the system failed to rehabilitate the inmate, and instead caused him or her damage. Pfeiffer also employs a great deal of pathos in this section, using charged words and phrases such as “tension,” “conflict,” “coerced,” and “deprivation” to describe what the inmates had to suffer. She also uses phrases with great emotional charge; for example, jail staff saw the inmates as “less than human.” She combines the perspectives of the people, their fellow inmates, and their family members to depict the conditions that they had to suffer and the fear and despair that they felt. The climax of this section occurs when the inmate either dies or suffers a horrible
Maggie's American Dream is Margaret Comer's inspiring biography written by her son James P. Comer. It also doubles as the autobiography of James P. Comer himself. It a great story of a person overcoming obstacles to reach their goals and dreams.
I feel that this book gives a rough, inspiring and passionate warning that the rush to imprison offenders hurts the guards as well as the guarded. Conover reminds us that when we treat prisoners like the garbage of society, we are bound to treat prison staff as garbage men -- best out of sight, their own dirt surpassed only by the dirt they handle. Conover says in one part of his book, “Eventually admitting that being in a position of power and danger brings out a side of myself I don’t like.” I feel both prisoners and officers deserve better.
Today, prisons are the nation’s primary providers of mental health care, and some do a better job than others. Pete Earley focuses his research on the justice system in Miami, Florida. He documents how the city’s largest prison has only one goal for their mentally ill prisoners: that they do not kill themselves. The prison has no specialized
After reading the book I have gained a new understanding of what inmates think about in prison. Working in an institution, I have a certain cynical attitude at times with inmates and their requests. Working in a reception facility, this is a facility where inmates are brought in from the county jails to the state intake facility, we deal with a lot of requests and questions. At times, with the phone ringing off the hook from family members and inmates with their prison request forms, you get a little cynical and tired of answering the same questions over and over. As I read the book I begin to understand some of the reason for the questions. Inmate(s) now realize that the officers and administrative personnel are in control of their lives. They dictate with to get up in the morning, take showers, eat meals, go to classes, the need see people for different reason, when to exercise and when to go to bed. The lost of control over their lives is a new experience for some and they would like to be able to adjust to this new lost of freedom. Upon understanding this and in reading the book, I am not as cynical as I have been and try to be more patient in answering questions. So in a way I have changed some of my thinking and understanding more of prison life.
Relations during this time with the prison and the outside world are discussed, as well as how these relations dominated life inside of a prison and developed new challenges within the prison. After Ragen left, Frank Pate become his successors. Pate faced a problem because he neither sought nor exercised the charismatic authority of Ragen. The Prison remained an imperatively coordinated paramilitary organization, which still required its warden to personify its goals and values. Jacobs goes on to discusses how what Pate did, was not the same direction or ideas that Ragen was doing or had. Jacobs’s counties this discussion with the challenges and issues that prison had during the time of 1961 through 1970. Jacobs blames that the loss of a warden who could command absolute authority, the loss of local autonomy, it heightened race problems among blacks, and the penetration of legal norms exposed severe strains in the authrotitarian system, and says pate cant control
The “pains of imprisonment” can be divided into five main conditions that attack the inmate’s personality and his feeling of self-worth. The deprivations are as follows: The deprivation of liberty, of goods and services, of heterosexual relationships, autonomy and of security.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in 17 Americans suffer from a serious mental illness. That is roughly one person in an average high school classroom. These mentally ill people live a different life, and in some situations, they cannot fully comprehend what is happening around them. These people need a little more time and patience than the average person would need in any given situation. Because of this, they need to be handled differently by police officers when they come into contract. This is not happening and it is causing chaos. In “Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects,” an article featured in The New York Times on April 1, 2014, writers Fernanda Santos and Erica Goode bring attention to the treatment of mentally ill suspects when being confronted by police officers. The article starts with the emotional story of James Boyd to capture the audience’s attention and to create distaste for the police, which is reinforced throughout the article. The authors then go on to have various professionals testify that in recent years the number of incidents between mentally ill people and police officers has risen dramatically. Santos and Goode describe the process of many police departments and compare them with Albuquerque’s, showing that their procedures when handling mentally ill suspects either is not used or there are no guidelines to follow. This article portrays the ignorance some people have when handling situations with mentally ill people and how that affects the lives of the mentally ill and could potentially affect the reader’s own life. Structural, material, and characterological coherence are evident in the article to effectively shed light on how police officers need to revise...
Coyne uses paradigms within the text to describe the horrible situation in a maximum security federal prison. In “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, she describes maximum security as “Pit of fire…Pit of fire straight from Hell. Never seen anything like it. Like something out of an old movie about prisoners…Women die there.” (61). Using this paradigm draws the reader in and gives him or her a far fetched example of what maximum security federal prisons are like. Amanda Coyne backs up her claim with many examples of women in the federal prison who are there for sentences that seem frankly extreme and should not be so harsh. For example, in “The Long Goodbye” Mother’s Day in Federal Prison” we learn about a woman named Stephanie. The text states that Stephanie is a “twenty-four-year-old blonde with Dorothy Hamill hair
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.
HRW: Ill Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness: VII. DIFFICULTIES MENTALLY ILL PRISONERS FACE COPING IN PRISON. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/7.htm
Knowing and understanding the author’s purpose, we see where he is coming from and what his “point of view” is. We see that the author is someone that does not agree with the activities that occur in the native prison. It makes the author feel uncomfortable with the establishment and its procedures.
Seltzer, T., 2005, ‘Mental health courts – A misguided attempt to address the criminal justice system’s unfair treatment of people with mental illnesses’, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 570-586.
Although prisons have the primary objective of rehabilitation, prisoners will likely go through many other troubling emotions before reaching a point of reformation. Being ostracized from society, it is not uncommon to experience despair, depression, and hopelessness. Be that as it may, through reading various prison writings, it can be seen that inmates can find hope in the smallest things. As represented in “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane”, the author, Etheridge Knight, as well as other black inmates look up to Hard Rock, an inmate who is all but dutiful in a world where white people are placed at the top of the totem pole. However, after Hard Rock goes through a lobotomy-esque procedure, the motif
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 the media, prisons have always been depicted as a horrible place. The film, The Shawshank Redemption, is a prime example that supports the media 's suggestions about prison life. In the film we are familiarized with Andy Dufresne, who is a banker that is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. While trying to both remain discreet and find his prison identity, he assists Ellis Boyd 'Red ' Redding, a peddler, and Brooks Hatlen. In his attempt to fit into the rough prison subculture, Andy strategically starts a business relationship with the captain Captain Bryon Hadley and Samuel Norton. The film gives an insider 's look at various aspects of prison life. These aspects include prison culture; explicitly, guard subculture and inmate subculture.