Let’s Send ALL Sick People To Jail!

A seriously mentally ill person is more likely to be sent to jail than the hospital according to a new report described by USA Today. The report by the National Sheriff’s Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center found that in every single state in the USA, someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example, is more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. In some states, such as Arizona, a person is nearly 10 times more likely to be jailed than hospitalized. And no, this is not because the mentally ill are evil, it is because we, as a society, fail to take care of people who clearly sick.

Beginning in the 1960s, the mentally ill were kicked out of mental hospitals to take care of themselves. In 1955 there was one psychiatric bed for every 300 Americans. In 2005 there was one psychiatric bed for every 3,000 Americans. Without the needed supervision of health care workers, a large portion of individuals with mental disorders became homeless or went to prison. Today, we still don’t have an effective system to deal with the mentally ill.

What is the solution? There are many treatments that don’t need hospitalization, but mentally ill people need access to proper treatment. Many of the mentally ill are poor and homeless and therefore do not have the resources to afford or even seek healthcare. Many do need to be hospitalized though, so we might want to rethink the deinstitutionalization movement – it is cheaper for us as a society to send sick people to the hospital than to jail.

Although we don’t want it to get to the point where a mentally ill person ends up in court, if he does, the judge may be the solution. In Dallas, Judge Dough Skemp effectively gives non-violent mentally ill defendants a second chance by sending them away for treatment in a state hospital instead of jail, where they are stabilized and are capable of standing trial.

It is time to stop treating the mentally ill as a problem and figure out a solution! Mental illness can happen to anyone, and it is unacceptable for us to ignore the problem by making it rot away in jail.

What other solutions can we implement to treat the mentally ill?

Article image by cartoonstock.