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Prisons Are a Very Poor Place to Treat the Mentally Ill
Thousands of people with treatable mental illness are inmates essentially getting punished for being sick.
Yes, jails are America's "new asylums" ("Jails Swell With Mentally Ill," page one, Sept. 26). Thousands of people with treatable mental illness who once might have been patients getting treatment are instead inmates essentially getting punished for being sick.
The front-page charts in your outstanding article provide a perfect snapshot of the plunging availability of public hospital beds, where desperately ill people once received intensive treatment they needed to begin recovering.
The complete picture would also chart the explosion of homelessness, suicide, homicide and victimization associated with untreated mental illness that has taken place at the same time. Public policies recognizing the need to provide treatment for individuals with the most severe mental illnesses could stem the criminalization of mental illness and reduce the many other incalculable personal and public costs of nontreatment. For those policies to change, there needs to be some collective agreement that the conditions you describe are no longer acceptable. That consensus doesn't currently exist. Until it does, the picture will only get darker.
Doris A. Fuller
Executive Director
Treatment Advocacy Center
Arlington, Va.
Kudos to the Journal for shedding light on this serious societal problem that has warranted attention for decades. When governments across the country failed to provide adequate community-based care in the wake of deinstitutionalization, expensive and ineffective inpatient hospitals were replaced with more expensive and inhumane incarceration in jails and prisons. Not only is criminalizing people with mental illness cruel, it is ineffective public policy and a gross waste of tax dollars, costing far more than preventative mental-health treatment.
Many communities have begun to address this problem through partnerships between the public mental-health and criminal justice systems. Several approaches work and should be expanded. They include improved police training, jail diversion and treatment alternatives, better correctional mental-health care and discharge planning to ensure immediate access to mental-health services upon release. The most successful—and cost effective—options are prevention and treatment methods such as assertive community treatment and supported housing that have proved to reduce arrests and incarceration and foster healthy, productive lives in the community.
Giselle Stolper
President and CEO
Mental Health Association of New York City
New York
We need a serious national conversation about our obligations to those truly incapable of fending for themselves, notably including the "5% of all adult Americans [who] suffer from a serious mental illness." Some of those people have a support system that enables them to function. Many do not. The sickest are out in the street until hunger drives them to steal food or voices drive them to go on a killing rampage, and we park them in jail. Is this in anyone's best interest?
Deborah Bennett
Staatsburg, N.Y.
A version of this article appeared October 8, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Prisons Are a Very Poor Place to Treat the Mentally Ill. |
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