More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons

Using using 2004 - 2005 data not previously published, the natiounal sheriff's association found that in the United States there are now more than three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals. America'a jails and prisons have become our new mental hospitals.

Recent studies suggest that at lest 16 % of inmates in jails and prisons have a serious mental illness. In 1983 as similar study reported that the percentage was 6.4%. Thus, in less than three decades, the percentage of seriously mentally ill prisoners has almost tripled.

It is now extremely difficult to find a bed for a seriously mentally ill person who needs to be hospitalized.

In historical perspective, we are returning to the early nineteenth century, when mentally ill persons filled our jails and prisons. At that time, a reform movement sparked by Dorothea Dix, lead to a more humane treatment of mentally ill persons. We have now returned to the conditions of the 1840's by putting large numbers of mentally ill persons back into jails and prisons.

Dr. Stephen Moffic, a prison psychiatrist at a Wisconsin Prison, says that in many cases prisoners have better access to mental healthcare in prison than in the community because the community's resources have been so drastically cut.

What a shame that people may have to be imprisoned in order to have good access to mental health care and at what cost to our economy and at what human cost! The state can solve this problem if it has the political will.

Mike Schoenhofer