For my senior paper I will be doing my paper on mental health in prisons. Mental health in prison is a fairly broad topic, so I will be focus on if the numbers of inmates receive help for their illness while in prison compared to outside of prison. It is my thought that inmates receive more treatment for their mental illness than people not incarcerated because it is more available to them and cheaper. For this paper, I will have many sources that are pulled from journal databases, such as National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstract Database. I have also found a few published books, which have valuable information about mental health in prisons. All of the sources that I will use will either come from published journals or book, scholarly sources. …show more content…
At the end of the paper I will discuss polices that would help increase the number of patients that receive help both inside the prison or even other criminals that may not be incarcerated but under other forms of supervision. I think that doing my senior paper on mental health in prisons have many advantages, first of all, there is a lot of new information and statistics coming out all the time. I think that it is also a very important topic because a lot of people in the world suffer from some kind of mental illness. The down side of this topic is that, while there is a lot of information about mental illness, it was a little hard to find about mental illness inside
The video named, “The New Asylums,” is about people in prison who have mental illness. Many people who have mental illness are held in prison throughout the America instead of hospitals or facilities, and they are more tend to be homeless before arrested and put in to jail. According to video, there are some mental health treatment meetings in prison. However, some psychologists think that people who have mental illness in prison need hospitalization. Moreover, the video claims that inmates who has severe mentally illness cant follow the rules.
In this sense, it is obvious that the PIC system falls short of prioritizing and appropriately addressing incarcerated individuals' mental health needs. This failure has serious consequences since it can worsen underlying mental health difficulties and contribute to a recurrence cycle, undermining rehabilitation and public safety efforts. This is a critical issue that must be addressed to ensure the well-being and rehabilitation of individuals incarcerated. However, it does not hide the fact that PIC does not prioritize the mental health of inmates and provides the necessary resources. The article "Analyzing the Relationship between Mental Health Courts and the Prison Industrial Complex” by Helen Zhou and Elizabeth B. Ford, investigated how mental health courts intersect with and possibly support the prison industrial complex.
More people get incarcerated for non-violent crimes and crimes caused by mental illnesses or drug abuse (Webb, 2009) and because these people get put in regular prisons, instead of in mental health facilities or facilities to help against drug addiction, where they could be treated to further prevent crimes driven by their illness (Webb, 2009), the prisons get overfilled and cannot hold the more ‘important’ prisoners that needed to be locked away from the public. A strong link of the criminal justice process is that the system tries to keep it fair for everyone. Every defendant has the right to an attorney so they can be defended properly and fairly and “Only judges who are adequately informed about a case can effectively control the proceedings and examine evidence” (Tochilovsky, 2002) It is also important for the criminal justice system that those involved show discretion and although this is not always the case, discretion by the judges, police, etc.
Mentally ill prisoners in prison should be well taken care of. These offender need more care than those without a mental illness due to the illness they have they could hurting innocents civilian and guards or other prisoners like themselves or even themselves. Mentally ill offender need more medicines, Improve conditions, and the cost to keep them. Medicines Mentally ill offenders need as much more medicine than inmates without a mental illness,
Another issue that the American prison systems were facing was their constant practice of locking away mentally ill individuals to very long prison sentences that only seriously worsened their conditions, and even made their chances of overcoming mental illness, nearly impossible. Even medications that were prescribed to these individuals made them suffer serious and sometimes even worse, side effects. Although some states banned the high rates of mentally ill individuals to prisons, this only meant they were more targeted and thrown in jail for petty offenses by police. Many prisons do not have the resources, nor the skills needed to adequately and appropriately care for the mentally ill, therefore many of them suffer and even die from this
Defendant’s physical well-being is often ignored as noted in the above case, but their mental well-being is ignored as well. Jail inmates are often traumatized due to the treatment they undergo while incarcerated. Kalief Browder is just one example of an inmate who while awating trial was place in solitary confinement. Browder endured over 700 hundred days in solitary ultimately causing his mental health to severely decline (Gonnerman, 2014). The physical and mental trauma that inmates experience before they even undergo trial or receive plea deals demonstrates how the process of entering the criminal justice system is punishment itself.
Thesis: It is very important for the sake of Americans tax dollars that we change the way that prisons are run and increase the productivity of inmates so when they are released from jail they are ready to be a productive member in society and have the confidence to achieve new goals. Introduction: Day after day, millions of inmates sit in jail doing nothing productive with their lives. We are paying to house inmates that may not even have a good reason to be there. For example, drug offenders are being kept with murderers and other violent offenders.
This research paper will explore the relationship between solitary confinement and self-harm, mental illness, and the amount of violence inside and outside of prisons. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the impact that extreme isolation in prison has
Untreated mental illness is dangerous and over time we have learned that locking people with a mental illness is not the solution but makes it worse. People with untreated mental illness face many consequences. “People with untreated psychiatric illnesses comprise 250,000 people, of the total homeless population” (mentalillnesspolicy.org). The quality of life for these individuals is extremely heart breaking, and many are victimized regularly.
The study also says that among female inmates one third of them have some type of mental disorder. In prisons and jails, prisoners sit in their cells majority
Incarceration and women’s physical health. Pre-incarceration health risks, including addiction, trauma, and mental illness, contribute to incarcerated women’s poor physical health. Data support that incarcerated women bear a disproportionate burden of illness, women having higher rates of physical health problems than non-incarcerated women as well as incarcerated men Findings from the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2004, suggested that just over half (57%; n = 46,300) of women incarcerated in state prisons reported a current medical problem, such as arthritis (25%), asthma (19%), hypertension (17%), and hepatitis (10%).About 12% described having surgery since being incarcerated, and almost half (49%) described
Also, the correctional facilities help inmates with mental illness
What can be done The monitoring, prevention and treatment of mental disorders, as well as the promotion of good mental health, are part of the public health goals in prisons. According to World Health Organization (2017), even in resource-limited countries, measures can be taken to improve the mental health of prisoners and prison staffs, which can be adapted to the country’s cultural, social, political and economic environment (WHO, 2017). In the British prisons, some practices and policies have also been implemented, which reflect the positive impacts of prisoners’ mental health and wellbeing. Provide prisoners with appropriate mental health treatment and care.
The shift is attributed to the unexpected clinical needs of this new outpatient population, the inability of community mental health centers to meet these needs, and the changes in mental health laws (Pollack & Feldman, 2003). Thousands of mentally ill people flowing in and out of the nation 's jails and prisons. In many cases, it has placed the mentally ill right back where they started locked up in facilities, but these jail and prison facilities are ill-equipped to properly treat and help them. In 2006 the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that there were; 705,600 mentally ill inmates in state prisons, 78,000 in federal prisons, and
Thesis Hypothesis and Statement: Prisons in in the United States of America are definitely overcrowded, they are understaffed and I believe put very little effort on rehabilitation. The U.S. prison system was set up to rehabilitate prisoners so they can blend back into society as good people. But the factors as high crime rate and of course, mandatory sentences have caused a very high over crowding in our jail systems. This have caused a high increase in the budget deficit. Some citizens will say, where was the rehabilitation that we once used and it has all but now disappeared in our prison and jail system today.