As we all know, crackdowns on immigration, the war on drugs, and the incarceration of the mentally ill have all exploded the prison population here in the United States over the last 30 years at great cost to all of us and with virtually no decrease in crime to show for it.
But despite the political reality that our prisons are costing taxpayers billions of dollars by warehousing people who could be better treated and managed in the community, there are powerful economic drivers to keep locking more and more of them up. In fact incarceration and detention has turned into a multibillion dollar growth industry.
Perverse motivations lead to perverse outcomes. As with all complexes (State-corporate, military-industrial) the prison industrial complex is primarily motivated by economics, such that a formidable amount of prison industry capital is devoted to creating prisoners independent of the behavior of the citizens or the needs of the state.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), Wackenhut and the 16 other for-profit prison companies are all big donors to the campaigns of federal and state lawmakers seeking to expand both prison populations and prison privatization (CCA, which has a monopoly on running immigration detention facilities, also helped write the Arizona anti-immigration law).
CCA alone spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws.
Genuine prison reform is never going to come about unless these corporations themselves are targeted. As we have seen with the anemic Wall Street bail-outs, federal and state lawmakers are totally unwilling to undertake major reform that potentially affects the bottom line of their corporate donors.
Replacing Mental Hospitals with Prisons:
• Presently the US has more people (2.1 million) in prison than any other country in the world.
• There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.
• The costs of keeping a mentally ill individual in a penitentiary are three to six time what it costs to treat them at an outpatient mental health center.
• The US prison system had become the largest mental health provider in the country – with nearly 50 percent of inmates reporting mental health problems.
• http://www.hrw.org/...
Access to affordable Mental Health Benefits is Critical
We must do more to improve access to public benefits covering ALL needed mental health services. This was much discussed in the aftermath of the Gabriel Giffords shooting but seems to have fallen completely off the national radar just as quickly. How many more tragedies must we endure as a society before we recognize that aggressive treatment of serious mental illness benefits ALL OF US, not just the mentally ill?
The fact is that the few mentally ill fortunate enough to have health insurance cannot afford the treatment they need. Many psychiatric providers have stopped taking insurance all together because they cannot afford the full time staff necessary to fight the insurance companies for payments.
High Recidivism
I've actually had a judge mention to me before that, "We hate to do this, but we know the person will get treated if we send this person to prison." The problem with this is they usually get worse inside of prison, not better.
According to the most recent survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 81 percent of mentally ill inmates currently in state prison, 76 percent of mentally ill inmates in federal prison, and 79 percent of mentally ill inmates in local jails have prior convictions. In other words, incarcerating the mentally ill is counter productive.
How difficult is it to provide mental health care to prisoners?
According to the Human Rights Watch report Ill-Equipped:
Our research suggests that few prisons accommodate [mentally ill prisoners'] 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.
According to Dr. Gary Beven, the regional medical director of the Ohio prison system, "Providing effective psychiatric care in a maximum-security prison is extraordinarily difficult. Many patients decompensate and become extremely depressed, hopeless, suicidal. Many turn to severe self-mutilation or acts of self-injury. And many inmates that also suffer from severe mental illness become delusional and hallucinate."
Prisons are dangerous and damaging places for mentally ill people.
Other prisoners victimize and exploit them. Prison staff often punish mentally ill offenders for symptoms of their illness – such as being noisy or refusing orders, or even self-mutilation and attempted suicide. Mentally ill prisoners are more likely than others to end up housed in especially harsh conditions, such as isolation, that can push them over the edge into acute psychosis. Woefully deficient mental health services in many prisons leave prisoners undertreated – or not treated at all. Across the country, prisoners cannot get appropriate care because of a shortage of qualified staff, lack of facilities, and prison rules that interfere with treatment.
Recommendations:
1. More Mental health courts.
The goal is to divert mentally ill offenders from jails and into community based mental health treatment programs.
2. Revise mandatory minimums.
We need to reduce the unnecessary and counterproductive incarceration of low-level nonviolent offenders with mental illness. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws should be revised to ensure prison is reserved for the most serious offenders (whether or not mentally ill) and prison sentences are not disproportionately harsh.
3. Improve access to public benefits covering all needed mental health services.
It does far more harm than good to keep rearresting and releasing mentally ill people who can't get adequate treatment outside of prison. The Arizona shooting should have been the wake up call we need that affordable access to mental health treatment for all is a must. If we can't get any form of sensible gun control laws in this country, the least we can do is make sure that the millions of mentally ill people who could easily get one have access to treatment.
4. Set high standards for prison mental health services
Quality mental health services in prison will not only help prisoners, but will improve safety within prisons, benefiting others prisoners and staff. Good correctional mental health services will also increase the likelihood that prisoners will be able to return successfully to their communities following release.
Reducing the numbers of mentally ill offenders sent to prison will also free up prison resources to ensure appropriate mental health treatment for those men and women with mental illness who must, in fact, be incarcerated for reasons of public safety. Not only is this form of corruption destroying our justice system, we cannot afford to keep locking people up so a few corporations can make a profit from it.
Most of the statistics in this diary were taken from a Human Rights Watch Report which can be found here:
Ill Equipped: Human Rights Watch on Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness
