Monday, October 27, 2003

Prisons as Mental Institutions: The Mass Incarceration of the Mentally Ill
Feature article at FindLaw by Joanne Mariner, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch - "...Despite good reasons to limit the incarceration of the mentally ill, the number of mentally ill people behind bars continues to grow. Over the past few decades, the country's prisons and jails have become its 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." See also the item posted here last week on the related report by the Human Rights Watch.