When mental illnesses started to become a topic that need attention, doctors invented the mental asylum. Although mental asylums were meant to be places where people with mental illness could go to get better, in reality patents were not helped and often discharged after a few days even though they were still ill. This caused many to commit crimes and in the end the idea of mental asylums was abandoned. Now with new research, hospitals can heal most people and are a lot more effective than the asylums, but they do not help everyone. Often times, people with mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, can not get help, and because they cannot control themselves without the medication, most end up in prisons from committing crimes. Because hospitals can not help everyone, prisons have become the new mental asylum. …show more content…
An imbalance of chemicals in the brain, called dopamine and serotonin, cause schizophrenia. The imbalance causes distorted thoughts, hallucinations, and delusions. Medication for this disorder, “called ‘atypical antipsychotics’”, includes Abilify, Risperdal, Zyprexa, which blocks neurotransmitters, like dopamine, to bring it back to a normal amount (Grohol). Schizophrenia makes the person to not know what is real and not, which can lead to harm dangerous activities. The hallucinations and delusions lead to behavior that can get you in prison. Most major crimes are not caused by people with mental illnesses, but a percentage of smaller crimes are caused by untreated mentally ill people. Even though “most individuals with serious mental illness are not dangerous” and are more prone to self harm than harm to others, some of them commit crimes and end up in prisons (Carroll). These people are usually not getting proper help or are abusing their
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
Australian Institute of Criminology, 2007, The identification of mental health disorders in the criminal justice system, prepared by Ogloff, J.R.P., Davis, M.R., Rivers, G. and Ross, S., Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra.
The dopamine theory behind the cause of schizophrenia states that in part excess dopamine is a possible factor or there is more than an average number of dopamine, Type 2 receptors. Risperidone acts on the dopamine D2 receptor (Sarason, et al, 2001, pg. 368). Risperidone is a psychotropic drug and is part of the chemical class of benzisoxazole derivatives used as a treatment for schizophrenia, with some results for bipolar manic disorder, as well.
The type of crimes that these offenders commit can either be minor or violent crimes. It has been an issue on how people think that having a mental illness leads to violent crimes, when in reality not all of them commit violent crimes. An example of an offender committing these type of crimes would be Johnnie Baxstrom. Johnnie Baxstrom was a mentally ill offender who had committed numerous crimes throughout his life like drinking and property offenses. It wasn’t until October 21, 1958 where he committed a violent act by attacking and stabbing a police officer with a knife. In essence, according to studies people with severe psychological illnesses are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than the general
Wouldn’t it be completely irrational to sentence every mentally ill individual to jail purely because they suffered from a mental illness? Often, mentally ill people behave in an eccentric manner and allure the attention of police officers who do not differentiate the mentally ill from mentally stable people and immediately charge them with misdemeanors. There are approximately 300,000 inmates, with the number increasing every year, which suffer from a mental illness and do not receive proper treatment. Jails are not adequately equipped to care for mentally ill inmates, which can lead to an escalation of an inmate’s illness. Society has failed to provide enough social resources for citizens suffering from psychiatric illnesses in its community, transferring mentally unstable individuals between mental institutions and jails, when in fact adequate aid such as providing proper medication, rehabilitation opportunities, and more psychiatric hospitals in communities is a necessity to reconstitute these individuals.
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.
The current prison and criminal justice system has not proven to be helpful in rehabilitating offenders and preventing recidivism. To successfully alter this situation it is important to understand what steps and measures are available to assist those who find themselves imprisoned. The techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy have proven to be effective in treating depression, anxiety and drug addictions among other things. Analyzing the techniques developed in cognitive behavioral theory and applying them to psychotherapy in prison environments can assist in making improvements in the prevention of criminal activity, rates of incarceration and safety and security of the general population. The literature shows that the use of cognitive behavioral therapy has been effective in the treatment of a variety of criminal offenders.
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.
This essay intends to address the role that state agencies, both within the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and more broadly the institutions of education, employment and health, play in supporting and implementing diversionary programs for offenders with mental health problems. Mental health is clearly one of the most critical issues facing the Australian and New South Wales (NSW) CJS with research indicating that offenders with mental health problems constitute the majority of those within the prison system. The current strategies for diversion will be critically evaluated in order to determine their effectiveness with regard to the delivery and production of justice, cultural sensitivity for Indigenous Australians will also be considered. The social construction of mental illness and the associated process of stigmatisation of this particular group will be explored in conjunction to explain why society still fails to prevent the mass entry of people with mental health issues into the traditional CJS.
The asylum movement brought new ideas of rehabilitation for the ill which brought better chances of the mentally ill to be re-established unto society. Back then, prisons did not have any sort of help or rehabilitation to help them get “clean”. Now our prison system has different ways of helping the mentally ill. For examples, the government has added parole systems, counseling, and many other rehabilitation programs. The United States opened their first asylum January 1st, 1752. This was the first step to recovery. With the asylums being added it created a safer environment and actually treat them as normal human beings instead of hiding them away. Many citizens started realizing mental issue can be cured. After all the unfair treatment mentally
It is evident that those with mental illnesses have an increased likelihood of committing crimes. It is important to note, however, that not all people with mental illnesses commit crimes or violent behavior so a cause is not evident. Substance abuse, a mental disorder, is also seen as a large risk in violent behavior (Silver 2006). Hiday (1995) asks the questions of the direction of this correlation. Does mental illness lead to violence or is it vice versa?
Teplin, Abram & McClelland (1994) used a control group from the jail as well as the mentally ill population, however, there had to be an already established diagnosis of mental illness in those counted for the sample. They used the independent variable of hallucinations and delusions with violence as the dependent variable which was only counted when not induced by alcohol or drug use. The researchers found that the hallucinatio...
There are many different kinds of medications but as Dr. Krishna Patel wrote in “Modern Treatments”, the most common are Risperdal, Seroquel, and Zyprexa. After the failure of two antipsychotic medications doctors typically give patients Clozaril. Clozaril has one major side effect that is the most defective which is the “deficiency of white blood cells” (Piotrowski 3). White blood cells help fight bacteria and other illnesses and when those are destroyed the patient becomes more prone to development of other diseases. Each of these medications has different side effects that can damage the patient who is taking them. Based off of the overproduction of serotonin and dopamine the medication is used to block all production of each of these chemicals. Yvette Brazier writes in “Medical News Today” that serotonin acts as a neurotransmitter which helps send signals from one side of the brain to the other, and it can also be found in the digestive tract. Another chemical that is overproduced is dopamine. Lex Wunderink, a psychiatrist at University Medical Center, stated dopamine is a necessary for all people because it is a chemical that primarily deals with motivated behavior and has a direct relationship with memory, motor movement, sleep, libido, and addiction. Blocking off each of these chemicals may help the side effects of schizophrenia, but they create new problems for patients to cope
Mental health and the criminal justice system have long been intertwined. Analyzing and understanding the links between these two subjects demands for a person to go in to depth in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, because there are many points of view on whether or not a person’s criminal behavior is due to their mental health. Some believe that an unstable mental state of mind can highly influence a person’s decision of committing criminal actions. Others believe that mental health and crime are not related and that linking them together is a form of discrimination because it insinuates that those in our society that suffer from poor mental health are most likely to become a criminal due to their misunderstood behavior not being considered a normality in society. In this report I will go into detail of what mental health and mental illness is, what the differentiates a normal and a mentally unstable criminal, give examples of criminal cases where the defendant’s state of mind was brought up, introduce theories surrounding why one would commit crimes due to their mental health, and lastly I will discuss how the criminal justice system has been modified to accommodate mental health issues.