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Sometimes people and things are not as organized as we hope they should be and this could simply be caused by the lack of structure. Structure is a word that can be merely defined as to “construct or arrange according to a plan; or to give a pattern or organization to”. Structure is an important aspect used by mostly everyone. Whether it is used in shaping someone into someone better, forming an outline for an essay, running an organization, or even the basics of where to start when building a house, structure always remains helpful. The idea of structure is not meant to help you one hundred percent but it gives you a gist of the route you should be taking to achieve something successfully. Whether we notice it or not, structure is the starting root of something and it helps to guide a situation in order to avoid chaos. …show more content…
The number of mentally ill criminals has been increasing instead of decreasing, which would lead to the obvious conclusion that there is something wrong. During the deinstitutionalization movement, the populations of mental state hospitals decreased nearly ninety percent. The number of psychiatric patients went from 550,000 to 61,700 within the years 1956 and 1996 (Adams,1). This resulted in more patients being released into the community without the direct care and treatment that they need. The institutions are at fault and made a mistake in releasing mentally ill people without fully determining whether or not they are fit for society. Later on in further years, mentally ill people are found caught up in the criminal’s justice system and it continues to be that more inmates with mental illness are joining the criminal system as
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.
The fight for improved health care for those with mental illness has been an ongoing and important struggle for advocates in the United States who are aware of the difficulties faced by the mentally ill and those who take care of them. People unfortunate enough to be inflicted with the burden of having a severe mental illness experience dramatic changes in their behavior and go through psychotic episodes severe enough to the point where they are a burden to not only themselves but also to people in their society. Mental institutions are equipped to provide specialized treatment and rehabilitative services to severely mentally ill patients, with the help of these institutions the mentally ill are able to get the care needed for them to control their illness and be rehabilitated to the point where they can become a functional part of our society. Deinstitutionalization has led to the closing down and reduction of mental institutions, which means the thousands of patients who relied on these mental institutions have now been thrown out into society on their own without any support system to help them treat their mental illness. Years after the beginning of deinstitutionalization and after observing the numerous effects of deinstitutionalization it has become very obvious as to why our nation needs to be re-institutionalized.
In his Wall Street Journal article, “Mass Shootings and a Mental-Health Disgrace,” Tim Murphy, a United States representative from Pennsylvania and a psychologist in the Navy Reserve Medical Service Corps, analyzes the correlation between mentally ill individuals and the mass shootings that have been making headlines recently. Murphy has come up with the idea of a new bill: the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. He says this bill will help those individuals who have mental disabilities get the help that they need before their disabilities get any worse. In today’s world, people with a mental illness get sent to prison if they do something wrong instead of getting sent to a psychiatric hospital where they belong. I think this
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 purpose of jail is to control criminals, decrease crime rates, decrease recidivism, and by the end of the inmate 's sentencing individuals are expected to return to society as if everything were “normal”. However, the majority of individuals who are incarcerated is because they did not pay fines, they were not able to post bail, or because they have a mental health diagnosis. Who knew jails were the new models of psychiatric facilities. It’s been proven that people with mental illness often experience worsened symptoms, recidivism, and abuse while incarcerated. Which poses the question of is jail the place individuals with a mental health diagnosis should be?
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.
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...
The criminal justice system plays a major part within our community. Every aspect of the criminal justice system affects the community and the population. Within our jails and prison 20% of the U.S population is currently being held in a prison or jail. Within that 20% percent a lot of these people are diagnosed with a mental illness. The increase of people in the system and the increase of reported mentally ill person is very alarming and important to discuss and find solutions for. With increase of mentally ill individuals increasing the level of training for officers is not at the same right. Most prisons or jail don’t have a specific way to handle nor treat individuals with a mental illness. This paper will discuss recent research regarding mental illness is, the impacts of mental illness, the impact of the criminal justice system, and how the system handles these individuals.
These facilities provided “custodial care”, meaning they served as supervised shelter or confinement, rather than a source of effective treatment (Chow & Priebe, 2013; Glazer, 1992). Conditions were unfavorable and not much was being done to alleviate the state of the mentally ill. After much pressure from social activists to combat the issue of the poor living conditions of the mentally ill, the United States government eventually provided land and funding for the establishment of over 30 state psychiatric hospitals by the end of the 19th century (Grob, 1994; Unite for Sight, n.d.). Under this system of institutional care, the mentally ill could receive care and treatment from professional staff in a more structured environment, which seemed more promising than previous solutions. However, many of these institutions were underfunded, overcrowded, and operating with inadequate staff, leaving room for poor living conditions, the abuse of patients, and frequent human rights violations (Chow & Priebe, 2013; Dowdall, 1999; Unite for Sight, nd.). These factors, combined with the development of psychiatric drugs between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, drove the movement towards deinstitutionalization (Dowdall, 1999; Smoyak,
...inical professor at the University of Colorado. Unless the country develops a decent mental health care system, this issue will continue (Qtd. In “Prison Health Care, 3). More than 2 million inmates in U.S. prisons suffer from mental illness, addiction, infectious, or chronic diseases like HIV/AIDS and diabetes (“Prison Health Care”, 1). About a quarter suffer from severe depression and a fifth from psychosis (2). The majority of prisoners have no health problems at the time they became incarcerated; once imprisoned, they acquired a mental disorder (1). In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have the right to free health care due to the Eighth Amendment (4). Yet, prisons fail to provide health care of decent quality. Some prisons do not even have licensed physicians (5). Most doctors do not wish to work in a prison, therefore resources become substandard.
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...
Maureen O’Keefe, a researcher from the Colorado Department of Corrections, discovered that in Colorado alone 35% of the prisoners in isolation had a serious mental illness before being placed in isolation (Weir, 2012). Instead of providing medical treatment for these people they are placed in solitary confinement, where they are locked in a cell for 23 hours a day and so they’re not given reasonable medical treatment for their conditions. The number of people with mental illnesses being placed in isolation in the US is such a level where it is becoming the mental health system rather than the correctional system. This is supported by the fact that U.S prisons hold more than three times as more prisoners with mental illnesses than mental health institutions in the U.S (Human Rights Watch, 2009).
Organizational structure is the way that an organization arranges people and jobs so that work can be performed and goals can be achieved. Good organizational design helps communications, productivity, and innovation. Many organization structures have been created based on organizational strategy, size, technology, and environment. Robbins and Judge (2011, p. 504) listed three common structures: simple, bureaucracy, and matrix. In this post the author will describe the matrix structure, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages.