Punishing illness

There are ten times more mentally ill Americans in prisons and jails than state psychiatric hospitals, a report found. In 2012, there were an estimated 356,268 inmates with severe mental illnesses in U.S. prisons and jails. There were only 35,000 mentally ill individuals in state psychiatric hospitals. The report added that those individuals’ conditions often deteriorate while incarcerated. Mentally ill Americans who are imprisoned often leave imprisonment sicker than when they entered. In prisons and jails today, mentally ill prisoners are often victimized or sent to solitary confinement, and they attempt suicide at disproportionate rates.

“The lack of treatment for seriously ill inmates is inhumane and should not be allowed in a civilized society,” Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center and lead author of the study, said.

Mentally ill people were routinely confined to prisons and jails until the early 19th century, when the practice was deemed inhumane and problematic, and they were hospitalized instead.  But following a series of exposés on the “abysmal” conditions of those psychiatric hospitals, many were closed by the 1970s. The study eplained , “By shifting the venue of these mentally ill individuals from hospitals to prisons and jails,we have succeeded in replicating the abysmal conditions of the past”

From Al Jazeera