Bipolar Today

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The Los Angeles Times wrote an article today about the state of treatment for those with mental illness in California prisons. As you may know, this May, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the overcrowding in California prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment and ordered California to reduce its 156,000 prison population by at least 30,000. Part of the solution has been to have those with smaller sentences serve their time in county prisons.

The difficulty is that county prisons are even less well equipped to deal with mental illness among prisoners than the state prisons were. According to Human Rights Watch, people in prison are two- to four-times more likely to have mental illnesses than the rest of the population. In overcrowded state prisons, they were not receiving adequate care, but in county lockups, they may receive no care at all.

Commentary

There are a lot of issues involved in this discussion. First, there is the question of adequate care. While I agree that county lockups are poorly equipped to deal with mental illness, the state lockups are also poorly equipped, largely because they are so overcrowded. Presumably, if they reduced their population by almost 20%, as ordered by the Supreme Court, they would have more services available for those mentally ill people that are left behind. As a result, it’s not immediately clear that this change will lead to an overall decrease in care. Those moved to county prisons will get little or no care, but those left behind should get better care.

The issue as I see it is why we have so many people with mental illness, including bipolar disorder, locked up at all. I don’t want to make the simplistic claim that everyone with a mental illness is not responsible for his or her actions, but I will make the observation that, if the rate of mental illness is triple among the prison population, one can infer that two-thirds of those with mental illness in prison would not be in prison if they were well. People with mental illness are being imprisoned too often.

Related posts:

1. Mental Illness Leads To Worse Oral Health
2. Canadian Psychiatric Association Criticizes Crime Bill
3. Iowa Mental Health Court Helps Keep Mentally Ill out of Prison
4. Alabama Set to Close Four State Mental Hospitals
5. California Emergency Rooms Overwhelmed With Mentally Ill