Have jails become the replacement for mental hospitals? https://bit.ly/3UhZIVK

Salon.com reports, “researchers looked at data from all 3,141 U.S. counties and singled out variables that could influence jail population per capita. After analyzing their data, it became clear that, as the report puts it, “counties with smaller populations, larger percentages of individuals that did not graduate high school, that have more health-related issues, and provide fewer community treatment services are more likely to have higher jail population per capita.”

The article later quotes Wanda Bertram, Communications Strategist at Prison Policy Initiative: “We’ve known for some time that this country’s chief response to serious mental illness is incarceration, a fact that stands out because prisons are so clearly unsuited to treating mental illness. Our organization recently found that even though 43% of people in state prisons have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, only 26% have received some form of mental health treatment, and only 6% are currently receiving treatment.”

Bertram also explained her perspective that “the major problem is an ideology that says that if you have some kind of illness, including mental illness, you ought to be the primary person responsible for your own care. That’s the ideology that props up our healthcare system, where sick people bear extraordinary costs and crushing debts. And it keeps us from asking why mental health services like therapy, psychiatry, and long-term care are not only expensive, but difficult to access.” Pointing out that their report revealed roughly half of people in state prisons lacked any kind of health insurance prior to their arrest, Bertram concluded that “we continue to send people with mental disorders to prison, because there seems to be nowhere else for them to go.”