Abstract
In psychology and for a while mental health has been at its center of scientific study. Mental Health is known as one of the meccas of psychology due to its complexity and involvement with the brain. It is always important to know about mental health and how it takes up a lot of the cells that are within the prison system. The prison system is continually bias usually because of the amount of mistrials, prejudices, injustices and wrongful convictions that have taken place over the years. This paper explores and challenges the prison system and how prevalently connected it is with mental health. The Bureau of Justice showed statistics, during the 12 months ending at midyear 2007, where there were 13 million admissions to local jails in the United States. At midyear 2007, local jails held 673,697 adult males and 100,047 adult females. For the most part a lot of these jail inmates were pre-trial detainees (Jail Inmates at Midyear 2007). According to the law prisoners have a constitutional right to health care, including mental health treatment. The growth of local correctional populations has strained the limited capacity of jails and the responding of the health care needs of inmates (Life After Lockup: Improving Reentry From Jail to the Community). The situation becomes more challenging in the case of inmates with grim mental illnesses, who require specialized treatment and services (Treatment prospects for persons with severe mental illness in an urban county jail). There has been consistent evidence that people with mental illnesses aren’t represented in jails, and determining the extent of these higher rates is a first step to improve jail management. As we all know, the prison system is constantly being taken advantage of due to the wealth it brings into the economy. The American prison system is massive, as well as its turnover. According to (The Economics of the American Prison System) its estimated turnover was $74 billion dollars. If the prison system brings in so much money why is it that mental health isn’t being considered? The average cost of incarcerating an American prisoner varies from state to state. States, like Indiana have been keeping prices as low as $14,000 per inmate. While states like New York pay around $60,000 to keep their inmates behind bars. However and without a doubt the cost of running the American prison system is expensive and has increased through time, despite public opposition. For the past several years the judicial system has turned the prison system into legalized slavery. There have been many instances where free labor has taken place in prison systems and the amount of times where they have taken advantage of prisoners. Mental health takes play into this because a lot of trauma is gained from experiences like these and continues on generationally like a pattern. Ever since slavery ended in the 1800s many free black men and women were targeted and thrown into prisons. This created a lot of what the prison system is today. Living a life in and out of prison is a constant war because a lot of the time you don’t know anything outside of prison. Prison becomes home for a lot of these people because outside of prison they have nothing. Mental Health takes play because there is a lot of reoccurrences of suffering, pain and ordeal happening, where they go from one trauma to the next leaving their hands tied.
The prison system, like all over the world is known for their big impactful causes surrounding mental health. Mental health within the prison system is big within the confinement and punishment of people that have been convicted of crimes, especially felonies where they are held for months, years and sometimes for life. For a while and probably since the beginning of the system, the prison system has not been paying attention to the mental health that surrounds it. The majority of felons within the prison system suffer from many mental illnesses. Estimates of mental illnesses in U.S. jails have varied widely depending on its methodology and setting. Using survey methodology, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated in 1999 that 16.3% of jail inmates reported either a "mental condition" or an overnight stay in a mental hospital during their lifetime (Mental Health and Treatment of Inmates and Probationers). In 2006 the BJS informed that 64% of jail inmates had a recent "mental health problem" (Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates). The 2006 findings were based on personal interviews conducted in the 2002 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails and county jails, and the rate of 64% included all inmates who reported one or more symptoms of any mental illness. Data on functional impairment and duration of illness was not collected, and inmates were not excluded if their symptoms were a result of common medical conditions like bereavement, or substance use (Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates). Although the methods in this study were not consistent with many other efforts to establish the commonness of mental illnesses in jails, the findings are often mistaken and cited as evidence of a growing problem. Recently, Trestman and colleagues (Current and lifetime psychiatric illness among inmates not identified as acutely mentally ill at intake in Connecticut's jails) evaluated a group of inmates who were not identified at intake as having a mental illness and found that over two-thirds met criteria for a lifetime psychiatric disorder, including anxiety disorders and antisocial personality disorder. So in terms of these cases the information varied and depended on a lot of data.
Many believe felons don’t deserve the right to be treated well because of their actions and crimes they’ve committed in the past but I think the opposite. Felons are some of the most neglected people that are in need of the most help in terms of mental health. Studies show among the population in the U.S. jails that the most common illnesses inmates suffer from are schizophrenia and bipolar disorders (A Guide To Mental Illness and The Criminal Justice System by The National Alliance of Mental Illness). Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person feels, thinks and behaves. People with schizophrenia usually seem like they have lost touch with reality. The symptoms are divided into three categories: Positive, negative and cognitive. Positive symptoms are psychotic behaviors not generally seen in healthy people. People with positive symptoms may lose touch with reality. Those symptoms include, Hallucinations, Delusions, Thought disorders (an unusual or dysfunctional way of thinking), Movement disorders (distressed body movements). The negative symptoms are associated with disruptions to normal emotions and behaviors. The symptoms include the flat affect which means reduced expression of emotions via facial expression or voice tone, then there’s reduced feelings of desire in everyday life, difficulty beginning and sustaining activities and less speaking. For some patients, the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia are elusive, but for others, a lot more severe where patients may notice some changes in their memory and their abilities to think. Those symptoms include poor executive functioning, which means the ability to understand information and use it to make decisions, paying attention or focusing. A problem with working memory is the ability to use information immediately after learning it (The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Bipolar disorders are known for people’s sudden change with emotions regardless of their environment, also known as manic-depressive illness. Bipolar Disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in someone's mood, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out through and day-to-day tasks. There are four basic types of bipolar disorders all of them involve clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels. These moods range from periods of extremely up, elated or happy and energized behavior, which is known as manic episodes to very down, sad or hopeless periods, which are commonly known as depressive episodes. Less severe manic periods are known as hypomanic episodes. Hypomanic episodes are similar to those of mania. The symptoms are elevated mood, inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, etc. Hypomanic episodes don't significantly impact a person's daily function and never include any psychotic symptoms. Key workers that work within these systems, such as police officers, prosecutors, public defenders and jail employees may have limited knowledge about severe mental illness like schizophrenia and bipolar disorders and the needs of those who suffer from these illnesses. So imagine yourself in the position of these inmates’ then try to imagine all of these things while inside of a cell. That is why it is import to consider the lives of these people regardless of their past. These are complex mental illnesses that take huge tolls into someones life and could seriously put them in harms way.
In 1991 it was revealed that 40 percent of family members with severe mental illness had been arrested one or more times. (A Guide to Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System) Statistics like these are alarming because they show how mental illness goes hand in hand with the prison system. The people that suffer from mental illnesses are usually not in control of their emotions, which leads to them, acting irrationally. Mental illness is a lot like a jail where locked inside but instead of it being externally its internally. When it comes to males and females’ regarding mental health, data is fundamental. Teplin, Abram, and McClelland collected some of the most thorough data on the occurrence of mental disorders between both male and female jail inmates in the 1980s and 1990s in Cook County Chicago, Illinois. Data was collected for the purpose of measuring mental disorders. The researchers used the National Institute of Mental Health Diagnostic Interview Schedule with random samples of inmates awaiting trial in the Cook County Department of Corrections. They estimated rates of current inmates with severe mental disorders to be 6.4% for male inmates and 12.2% for female inmates (Comorbidity of severe psychiatric disorders and substance use disorders among women in jail. American Journal of Psychiatry). Some of the methods that were being used were, interviewers evaluated a random selection of samples from 1829 African American, non-Hispanic white, and Hispanic youth (1172 males, 657 females, ages 10-18 years) The researches then presented a 6-month frequency of estimates by demographic subgroups which includes the inmates sex, race/ethnicity, and age for affective disorders like major depressive episode, dysthymia, manic episode, types of anxiety like panic, separation anxiety, overanxious, generalized anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, psychosis, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, disruptive behavior disorders like oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and substance use disorders that included alcohol and drugs. For the results it resulted in two thirds of males and nearly three quarters of females met diagnostic criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders. Nearly 60% of males and more than two thirds of females met diagnostic criteria and had diagnosis with the specific impairment for one or more psychiatric disorders. Half of males and almost half of females had a substance use disorder, and more than 40% of males and females met criteria for disruptive behavior disorders. Affective disorders were also numerous, especially among females with more than 20% of females met criteria for a major depressive episode. Rates of many disorders were higher among females, non-Hispanic whites, and older adolescents. These results suggest substantial psychiatric morbidity among juvenile detainees. Youth with psychiatric disorders pose a challenge for the juvenile justice system and, after their release, for the larger mental health system. For these youth a lot of them grow up to be and end up becoming a lot more ill because they don’t have the resources to continue their mental health treatments, which results in not solving much of the problem for them. It continues to be a cycle where then it is passed down to their children and their children’s children since mental illnesses could be passed down genetically.
To conclude my paper I want to bring up solitary confinement and how it affects mentally ill people that are in the prison system. To familiarize, Solitary Confinement is the isolation of a prisoner in a separate cell as a punishment. That is the dictionary’s definition of solitary confinement but to get more in depth of what it is. Solitary confinement is used on inmates to punish them incase they weren’t following orders or behaved out of order. There have been many stories where prisoners have become gravely ill because of punishments like solitary confinement. A lot of the outcome results in Schizophrenia like symptoms like delusions and hallucinations. When an inmate is put into solitary confinement for a long time it usually results in a trauma due to the separation of interaction with the world. In solitary confinement there is no concept of time, weather and state of being since you are exiled and put into a box with nothing inside. Recently, physicians have increasingly confronted a new challenge that sustained solitary confinement of prisoners with serious mental illness. The practice has become prevelant despite the psychological harm it can cause. There has been limited professional or academic attention to the unique ethics-related dilemma of physicians and other health care professionals when prisons isolate inmates with mental illness. Solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand. Psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture. However, US prison officials have gradually embraced a variant of solitary confinement to punish and control difficult or dangerous prisoners. Wether in the socalled super max prisons that have proliferated over the past two decades or in segration units inside of regular prisons, tens of thousands of prisoners spend many years locked up 23-23 hours a day in small cells with solid steel doors. They live with extensive surveillance and security controls, the absence of ordinary social interaction, abnormal environment stiumuli, often only three to five hours of recreation alone in caged enclosure, and little if any educational vocational or other purposeful activities programs. The terms segregation, solitary confinement and isolation will be used interchangeably to describe these conditions of confinement. Isolation can psychologically be harmful to any prisoner, with the nature and severity of the impact depending on the individual, the duration, and particularly conditions (Health and Human Rights in a Changing World). Psychological effects like depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, and paranoia and obsessive thoughts are the result of being held in confinement. The effects of soliary confinement are especially significant for people with serious mental illness. People in prison usually commit suicide when they’re put in segregation units than anywhere else in prison. It happens frequently when mentally ill prisoners decompensate in isolation which results in crisis care or psychiatric hopitalization. Most will not get better as long as they are isolated. The prison system is heavily flawed when it comes to the consideration of mental health. I believe the prison system should become a place of betterment and rehabilitation for a persons mind and state of being. I say this so that they could get another chance at being able to come back into the world without having to go back to the person they were when they once entered. I also believe that it is possible for those that are within the prison system to come out and make a better life for themselves, their families and future. Evidently the prison system is seen as a business where many are becoming filthy rich off the backs of inmates. Mental Health is something to be considered and it is very important that we start discussing more about it within and outside of the prison system because everyday there are lives being lost due to the negligence and carelessness the system has. A lot of people see mental illness as a myth or something that can be prayed away at an instant but that isnt the case for Mental Health, Mental Health is very real and it is very alive especially within the prison system.