From The Dish: Prison Has Replaced Psychiatric Hospitals

For 2306 as we conclude our look at at criminal justice policy, and wind out way toward health and human service policy. This is also an example of interest group activity. The study described below is intended to spur reforms in our mental health system. Whether it does - following a previous story - might depend on whether elites support these suggestions.

Increasingly people with mental disabilities - who sometimes act out and find themselves in the criminal justice system - are treated there instead of hospitals.

- Click here for the story.

- And here for the report from the Treatment Advocacy Center that highlights the issue.

From the executive summary:

Prisons and jails have become America’s “new asylums”: The number of individuals with serious mental illness in prisons and jails now exceeds the number in state psychiatric hospitals tenfold. Most of the mentally ill individuals in prisons and jails would have been treated in state psychiatric hospitals in the years before the deinstitutionalization movement led to closing the hospitals, a trend that continues even today.
The treatment of mentally ill individuals in prisons and jails is critical, especially since such individuals are vulnerable and often abused while incarcerated. Untreated, their psychiatric illness often gets worse, and they leave prison or jail sicker than when they entered. Individuals in prison and jails have a right to receive medical care, and this right pertains to serious mental illness just as it pertains to tuberculosis, diabetes, or hypertension. This right to treatment has been affirmed by the US Supreme Court.

And a few items from their summary of findings:

• From 1770 to 1820 in the United States, mentally ill persons were routinely confined in prisons and jails. Because this practice was regarded as inhumane and problematic, such persons were routinely confined in hospitals until 1970. Since 1970, we have returned to the earlier practice of routinely confining such persons in prisons and jails.
• In 2012, there were estimated to be 356,268 inmates with severe mental illness in prisons and jails. There were also approximately 35,000 patients with severe mental illness in state psychiatric hospitals. Thus, the number of mentally ill persons in prisons and jails was 10 times the number remaining in state hospitals.
• In 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, a prison or jail in that state holds more individuals with serious mental illness than the largest remaining state psychiatric hospital. For example, in Ohio, 10 state prisons and two county jails each hold more mentally ill inmates than does the largest remaining state hospital

The Harris County Jail has been described as the largest mental health facility in the state. I can't find confirmation of that right now, but here are stores related to it:

- In Harris County, New Efforts to Treat Mental Illness In and Out of Jail.
- Harris County jail not the place to treat mental illness.
- County moving forward on jail diversion program for mentally ill.