Anybody watch frontline on PBS last night?

[gibbsvol]

What a shocking documentary about how our prison system is slowly becoming a dark and twisted version of the old mental asylum model. The seriously mentally ill that are convicted of crimes (most of the time related to their illness) are basically being swept under the rug and basically left to rot. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. The medical staff at most prisons only seek immediate short term solutions to these inmate's outbreaks. The result is costly constant reincarceration and extremely long prison stays for simple crimes. What can be done about this without bringing politics into it?

Check this exerpt from the frontline website:
Of the nearly 2 million inmates being held in prisons and jails across the country, experts believe nearly 500,000 are mentally ill. According to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), 16 percent of the prison population can be classified as severely mentally ill, meaning that they fit the psychiatric classification for illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder. According to staff at city and community jails, 25 percent of the jail population is severely mentally ill. However, when other mental illnesses, such as anti-social personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and depression, are included, the numbers are much higher, and NAMI puts the number of inmates suffering from both mental illness and substance abuse the percentage at well over 50 percent.
Why are so many mentally ill people ending up behind bars? Who is to blame?
Most experts agree that the increasing number of imprisoned mentally ill people is due to two major policy shifts over the past decades. One was deinstitutionalization, or the process of closing down mental hospitals throughout the country that began in the 1950s. The idea was that the mentally ill would do better living back in the community with a community-based mental health care system in place to handle their needs. But adequate funding, coordination and commitment didn't follow this change and the lack of resources and commitment to a community-based system of care continues to be a problem in the vast majority of American communities."

"Our research suggests that few prisons accommodate mental health needs. Security staff typically view mentally ill prisoners as difficult and disruptive, and place them in barren high-security solitary confinement units. The lack of human interaction and the limited mental stimulus of twenty-four-hour-a-day life in small, sometimes windowless segregation cells, coupled with the absence of adequate mental health services, dramatically aggravates the suffering of the mentally ill. Some deteriorate so severely that the must be removed to hospitals for acute psychiatric care. But after being stabilized, they are then returned to the same segregation conditions where the cycle of decompensation begins again. The penal network is thus not only serving as a warehouse for the mentally ill, but, by relying on extremely restrictive housing for mentally ill prisoners, it is acting as an incubator for worse illness and psychiatric breakdowns."

[lectrobyte]

1. Yes. I want my country back.

[FloridaPat]

2. There was something about this years ago. Everyone was concerned

about the mentally ill. People felt their rights were violated by being in mental institutions for years, so the got dumped on the streets. So a lot of them were homesless and unable to make their own way in the world.

I don't remember when this was. Way before Bushco. I am thinking maybe Reagan or Bush I. I could be wrong on that too.

[Tux]

4. 50's

It was done in the late 50's or early 60's.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. It was an unholy alliance between

the Republican budget cutters and the ignorant romantics who held the King of Hearts view that mental illness was just another way of viewing the world and that mental patients should be free to express themselves, coupled with media exposes of bad conditions at some mental hospitals.

There was supposed to be a two-part reform plan. 1) Close the big mental hospitals. 2) Replace them with community mental health centers.

However, the legislators discovered that Part 2 would cost money. Besides, how do you get someone whose brain chemistry is disrupted to keep regular appointment at a community mental health center, and what does that person do between appointments?

That's when we saw the explosion in the street population--the release of mental patients coinciding with the beginnings of the de-industrializing of America.

ON EDIT: The romantics began talking up de-institutionalization in the mid 1970s, and the Republicans thought, "Ooh, a budget cut!" in the early 1980s.

[catmandu57]

7. One more thing to lay at st. ronnies feet

it was a case of be careful what you ask for, warehousing the mentally ill, looking back at it maybe it wasn't entirely evil, it wasn't the best, but, it's better than what we have now.

[Tux]

3. Mental illness

Needs proper treatment. Most people just wnat to drug them up and let them on their way. Americans need to understand that the rate of mental illness shows how the culture is mentally ill and may be a trigger for the high rate eg fundie rants, neocons, lack of jobs, high housing, etc.

[bloom]

6. Yes - I found it to be terribly depressing...

While the guy from Ohio should be commended for dealing with the situation that he has been dealt - he knows that it should not be the role of the prison system to operate as the defacto state asylum.

It cannot be saving society anything to operate that way.