Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
November
5, 2003
Criminalizing the
Mentally Ill
Prisons
as Mental Institutions
By JOANNE MARINER
U.S. prisons and jails, packed with over two million
inmates, hold many people that society would be wise to keep
elsewhere. With state budgets bankrupted by the high costs of
mass incarceration, the need to reconsider the draconian sentences
meted out to nonviolent drug offenders has never been more obvious.
There is, moreover, another sizeable
group of prisoners for which wholesale imprisonment is even less
appropriate: the mentally ill. Prisoners with mental illness
frequently endure violence, exploitation and extortion at the
hands of other inmates, and neglect and mistreatment by prison
staff. Not only is the experience of imprisonment counter-therapeutic
for such prisoners, many mental health experts believe that it
dramatically increases their chances of psychiatric breakdown.
Despite good reasons to limit the incarceration
of the mentally ill, their numbers behind bars continue to grow.
Over the past few decades, the country's prisons and jails have
become the default mental health system. Somewhere between two
and four hundred thousand mentally ill people are incarcerated,
several times more than the number of people living in mental
institutions.
The results, from a therapeutic, humanitarian,
and human rights perspective, are appalling. "We are literally
drowning in patients," explains one California prison psychiatrist,
"running around trying to put our fingers in the bursting
dikes, while hundreds of men continue to deteriorate psychiatrically
before our eyes."
"Criminalizing"
the Mentally Ill
The American Psychiatric Association,
in a study published in 2000, concluded that as many as one in
five prisoners was seriously mentally ill, with up to 5 percent
being actively psychotic at any given moment. It also estimated
that over 700,000 mentally ill people were processed through
prison or jail each year. The mental disorders affecting these
prisoners include such serious illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar
disorder, and major depression.
There are no national data on historical
rates of mental illness among prisoners, but state information
suggests that the proportion of mentally ill prisoners has grown
significantly. Human Rights Watch, in a report published last
week, traces this increase to the inadequacy of the country's
mental heath services.
With the "deinstitutionalization"
effort that began in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of mentally
ill men and women were released from state institutions. These
people escaped grim conditions and sometimes brutal treatment.
They largely did not, however, obtain proper care after their
release. Rather than receiving continuing mental health treatment,
mentally ill people were released to communities that had made
little or no accommodation for their care.
While states cut funding for mental hospitals,
they did not make commensurate increases in the budgets for community-based
mental health services. Chronically underfunded, the country's
mental health system does not reach anywhere near the number
of people who need it.
Left untreated and unstable, mentally
ill people enter the criminal justice system when they break
the law. And given the punitive criminal justice policies of
the past few decades, they often face long stays behind bars.
Neglect and Abuse
In a series of disturbing passages, the
recent Human Rights Watch report described the abuses endured
by the mentally ill while incarcerated.
To begin with, few prisons or jails have
sufficient numbers of trained staff to accommodate prisoners'
mental health needs. As a result, many mentally ill prisoners
go untreated, or receive treatment that is extremely limited
in both quantity and quality.
From other prisoners, who label them
"dings" or "bugs," the mentally ill are vulnerable
to assault, sexual abuse, exploitation, and extortion. From security
staff, who frequently dismiss their symptoms as faking or manipulation,
they may face physical abuse and mental harassment. Human Rights
Watch cited numerous cases of correctional officers who taunted
mentally ill prisoners, deliberately provoked them, physically
mistreated them, used force against them maliciously, or turned
a blind eye to abuses against them by others.
Viewing mentally ill prisoners as difficult
and disruptive, correctional staff also frequently place them
in barren high-security solitary confinement units. Held in
small, sometimes windowless cells, these inmates are deprived
of nearly all human interaction and have extremely limited mental
stimulus.
In such harsh conditions, some mentally
ill prisoners deteriorate so severely that they must be removed
to hospitals for acute psychiatric care. But after their condition
stabilizes, they are frequently returned to the same segregation
units until the next psychiatric episode occurs.
The Need for Reform
The immeasurable human suffering caused
by the mass incarceration of the mentally ill is not only inhumane,
it is unnecessary. While some dangerous offenders must be confined
to protect society, there are many low-level, nonviolent offenders
with mental illness who could be safely diverted into community-based
mental health treatment programs. By reducing the overall number
of mentally ill prisoners, such programs would also free up prison
resources that could be used to remedy the generally low quality
of prison mental health care.
Federal legislation is currently pending
in Congress to institute such reforms. The bill, called the
Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, would
provide federal grants to divert mentally ill offenders into
treatment programs rather than prison or jail. It would also
allocate funding to improve the quality of prison and jail mental
health services, and to establish discharge programs for mentally
ill prisoners who are released.
It is national shame that our prisons
and jails serve as mental institutions. It reflects a lack of
planning, a failure of public commitment, and a single-minded
focus on punishment. The pending legislation, which is long
overdue, represents a saner and more compassionate approach.
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights lawyer. This article is based on Human Rights
Watch's just-released report, "Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons
and Offenders with Mental Illness," which was written by
Sasha Abramsky and Jamie Fellner. She can be reached at: mariner@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|