The Role Of Mental Illness In Prisons

Jailhouse Blues
Arman Tatevosian
Glendale Community College

Arman Tatevosian
December 10th, 2013
English 101

Jailhouse blues

Mental illness has become a topic that most people nowadays choose not to discuss for one reason or another. We as a society tend to forget about the mentally ill and cast them off to the side forgetting about them giving us a false sense that they are being taken care of, or in other words out of sight out of mind. Mental illness is a medical condition that obstructs a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, and ability to function daily. Almost like any other disease mental illness can be mild in some cases but severe in others. Some serious mental illnesses include;
bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. What makes mental illness different from any other disease is that the cases of mental illness can differ between person to person. This makes it difficult to fully understand and help the mentally ill because each patient has their own special twist on the mental illness which they are diagnosed with. Although two people are diagnosed with the same mental illness in this case schizophrenia, one person might be a catatonic schizophrenic which means he or she suffers from extremes in behavior such as hyperactivity and the mimicking of sounds and movements. The other person diagnosed could be a paranoid schizophrenic which means he or she may have delusions of great grandeur and false beliefs that there are individuals or groups that are out to do harm to them, causing the patient to spend most of his or her day running and hiding from something or someone that is actually not there. This means that the treatment and care for the mentally ill needs to be specified for each and every patient because no two cases of mental illness are the same.
Albert Maisel touched up upon the subject of the mentally ill and how they are treated and cared for at mental wards in his controversial article “Bedlam 1946”. His findings were quite disturbing, “Hundreds are confined in bare bed less rooms reeking with filth and feces by day lit only through half-inch holes in steel-plated windows, by night merely black tombs in which the cries of the insane echo unheard” (pg.1). Maisel also observed that “There is no shower in the infirmary and senile ward only two bathtubs for approximately sixty five patients (pg. 5). These are the conditions that Maisel observed and it is safe to say they are not even close to the proper ways that the mentally ill should be taken care of. Our mental institutes today have come a long way from the densely packed, unsanitary, and under staffed wards that had been some had been around some fifty odd years ago. Although our mental institutions have been upgraded to meet certain standards, the amount of mentally ill patients occupying these facilities is not as immense as it was before. Mentally ill patients have found a new home and it’s called prison. Due to their mental incompetency and the incompetency of law officials somewhere along the line a severely mentally ill patient has been accused of a crime thus landing them in the prison system.
This new found home for mentally ill patients has sparked a fire under the seats of many concerned Californians. Should California prisons foster severally mentally ill inmates? Research indicates that California prisons should not foster the severely mentally ill inmates.
Some might argue that whether mentally ill or not a person who commits a crime is considered a criminal and must be held accountable with the proper penalties. They might also state that this is how our society functions and if we don’t penalize the perpetrators they will keep doing what got them got them in jail the first place.
On the other hand according to Lopez (2013) “the jail held three thousand two hundred inmates diagnosed with a mental illness and accused of a crime[…] many have waited months for their day in court and the majority have cycled through at least once before” (pg.1). The amount of mentally ill inmates in the Los Angeles county jail is staggering, and the fact that the majority of them have already been through the prison system shows how ineffective the prison is in reforming mentally ill inmates.
Stated by Lewis
“The issue of how to handle mentally ill people in jail came to the fore with the closure of mental institutions three decades ago[…] there were about five hundred thousand people in those institutions in the nineteen sixties there are about one hundred thousand people in them now, they have gone somewhere else”(Schodolski 2002).
That somewhere else Lewis is speaking of is the state prison which has become a home for mentally ill Californians. A study released by the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriffs Association says that “nearly four times more Californians with serious mental illnesses are housed in jails and prisons than in hospitals” (Balassone 2010). This is a shockingly high amount of Californian residence who are suffering with serious mental illnesses that are not being taken care of properly.

“As default mental hospitals jails inherited the responsibility but lack the resources to fully treat these inmates, they have fewer medical staff members than hospitals, don’t stock as much medication, and usually are not licensed to force medication on uncooperative psychotic inmates” (Wilson 2009).
No matter how hard jails and state prisons try they cannot take care of the mentally ill in the proper manner, that’s just not what they were built for. Jails can try their best to accommodate for these mentally ill inmates but at the end of the day a jail is not a mental institution therefore jails are not meant for taking care of the mentally ill. Furthermore “living in crowded, unsafe and unsanitary conditions can cause prisoners with latent mental illnesses to worsen and develop overt symptoms” (Parry, 2011, pg.1). Prison does not only cease to help mentally ill inmates but it can also worsen their current mental state by causing them to acquire new symptoms. By putting the mentally ill in jail we do not fix the problem but only make matters worse “Sheriff Lee Baca has said for decades that he runs the nation’s largest mental hospital, but we’ve heard it so often that the shock has worn off” (Lopez pg.1). The Sheriff himself has said that he runs the nation’s largest mental hospital, when in fact he is actually in charge of a prison that is used to incarcerate criminals. The Los Angeles county jail has turned into a mental hospital that is unable to provide the correct care for the mentally ill inmates. A released report from the California Correction Standards Authority says “Rather than deinstitutionalize people with mental illness California has shifted many of them from one kind of institution, mental hospitals to another, its jails and prisons” (Wilson 2009). Instead of having people with mental illnesses treated in specialized facilities that focus on the betterment of the mentally ill they are put into jail which is the last place that mentally ill patients will receive help.
Carla Jacobs, of the California Treatment Advocacy Coalition says “jails and prisons are not created to be de facto psychiatric hospitals and the situation is getting worse in California (“Most likely jailed,” 2010).
It seems as if Californian prisons are involuntarily taking the role of mental institutes into their own hands. This unwilling transfer in roles causes the Californian prisons to overcrowd and be unable to provide the needed care for the mentally ill inmates. “This week, the department of corrections planned to begin housing up to fifty two mentally ill inmates in a new isolation unit at the substance abuse treatment facility in Corcoran” (Warren, 2002). Building such new facilities to house the mentally ill inmates is not the solution to the problem nor does it come cheap. Warren declared that the new units were built at a cost of eighty six million dollars. The money used to build these new facilities comes straight out tax dollars that can be used to pay for something more beneficial for Californians. Warren also states that “Mentally ill prisoners are frequently housed in such facilities because they assault or are preyed upon by other inmates”. It’s almost like building a prison inside a prison; the mentally ill inmates cannot cooperate or are sometimes endangered by the non-mentally ill inmates so they are put into these special segregation units which only shroud the problem for a while until it resurfaces. Justice Kennedy wrote, “in particular mentally
ill prisoners languished for months, or even years without access to necessary care […] they suffer from severe hallucinations and they decompensate into catatonic states” (as cited in Parry, 2011, pg.1). This shows that little is being done for the severely mentally ill inmates in Californian prisons, it almost seems as if they are set aside locked in their cells left to decay lacking the treatment and care which they need that the prison cannot provide. Ratan Bavnani executive director of the Ventura county chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness says that “In general people with mental illness can recover when given the appropriate treatment rather than to be sent off to jail only to become more psychotic and come back reoffended”(Wilson 2009). Although it may initially cost more to send people with mental illnesses to treatment, it is effective in helping the person overcome his or her mental illness and allows them to become a functioning part of society. In the long run it saves more money than having the same mentally ill person cycle through a prison system where they are no help to society.
Moreover “The criminalization of the mentally ill begins at the point of arrest if mental illness seems apparent a decision must be made by the arresting officer as to whether the individual should be taken to the hospital or jail”(Quanbeck, Frye, Altshuler, 2003). Officers are not trained to evaluate the mental conditions of accused criminals. The officer’s only job is to detain the perpetrator and pacify the situation that is at hand. When in Situations that deal with mentally ill law breakers the officer is usually unbeknownst to the suspect’s mental illness and ends up detaining the accused criminal and taking him or her to jail where their faith is sealed falling in an endless loop of going in and out of jail.
“A study involving a Los Angeles area police department suggests that officers often fail to detect mental illness in arrestees, the study found that while prevalence of serious mental illness in arrestees is ten percent, the majority of police officers surveyed believed that less than five percent of arrestees were mentally ill and in need of treatment” (Quanbeck, Frye, Altshuler, 2003).
This lack of knowledge goes to show how the mentally ill are brought about into the prison system of California. A combination of unfit officers and unjust law is pilling the mentally ill into our prisons. “Many of the hundreds of people who are jailed with mental illness each year in Ventura County struggle with serious brain disorders as well as substance abuse, low incomes and few family ties” (Wilson 2009). Many of the jailed mentally ill become prisoners to their own selves because they cannot help themselves nor do they have the appropriate family help and guidance, therefore once in prison the mentally ill inmates are pushed even further away from being helped and treated for their illness. As stated in Wilson “prisoners found incompetent to stand trial can wait for months for a bed in already full state mental hospitals while the prisoners sanity deteriorates” (2009). If a mentally ill person must stand trial but cannot because of incompetence what happens? Is he or she suddenly going to snap out their incompetent state for the trial? Or is it more likely that they will stay in a state of incompetence because of their mental inabilities which landed them in the courtroom to begin with? With such confusion going on it is safe to say that the mentally ill prisoner will continue to live with his or her illness until the proper treatment is administered. “Mentally ill inmates have higher recidivism rates than other inmates because they receive little psychiatric care after their release” (Balassone 2010). When the mentally ill are put in prison they don’t stay forever, they get released back into the world with the same problems that brought them into the prison in the first place. With this said the mentally ill patients slip up somewhere along the line and they end up back in jail. Sheriff’s deputy David Frost said “To compound the problem seventy five to eighty percent of the mentally ill inmates suffer from substance abuse” (Balassone 2010). The mentally ill inmates who cycle continuously through the prison system have a drug problem. People with reoccurring substance abuse problems and mental illness should not be placed into prisons but instead should be place in special treatment centers to stop the problem from occurring again and ultimately landing the mentally ill back in jail. The system that is being enforced in Californian prisons does not help the mentally ill whatsoever.
“One nationally recognized solution is called a mental health treatment court, which gives offenders the choice between going to jail or following a treatment plan including taking prescribed medications […] This mental treatment court was launched by the Stanislaus County and was singled out state wide in it’s for its success in recidivism rates in mentally ill offenders and helping smooth their transition back into society” (Balassone 2010). This proves that putting the mentally ill inmates on treatment plans helps improve their status and it stops them from falling back into the prison system. Most of the time people over look mental illness and the mentally ill patients because society has created a stereotypical image of mental illness in their head. Mental illness is a serious matter which that does not have enough light shown upon it. People living with serious mental illnesses need to be given the upmost importance when it comes to treatment and care. The seriously mentally ill have problems that do not allow them to function having a normal day to day life. This is why they should be given the extra care necessary and should not be placed in prison where they are forced to be on their own for the majority of time without receiving a guiding hand as to how to cope with their problem. Placing the mentally ill in the prison system is not only costly for the government but to show the rest of the world how we take care of the ones that we consider severalty ill.

References
Anonymous (2010), Mentally Ill Californians Most Likely Jailed: Not Hospitalized
Balassone, M.
(2010), Jails, prisons increasingly taking care of mentally ill
Lopez , S. (2012) , It’s a crime to house the mentally ill this way
Maisel, Q. A. (1946), Bedlam 1946 Most U.S. Mental hospitals are a shame
Parry, J. W. (2011). Supreme Court Embraces Minimal relief for Californian prisoners with Mental Disabilities and other Serious Health Care Needs. Mental and Physical Disability Law Reporter, 35(4), 545-6
Quanbeck, C. Frye, M. & Altshuler, L. (2003), Mania and the law in california: understanding the criminalization of the mentally ill. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(7), 1245-50
Schodolski J.V. (2002) Jail suicide rate vexes California: Placemnt of mentally ill is critical problem in many states
Warren, J. (2002), The State Court Approval Needed to use ‘supermax’ Cells; prison: judge rules officials must also notify inmates’ lawyers and facility watchdog before moving mentally ill convicts to the new high security
units