A few weeks ago, we wrote about the opening of a mental health court in Philadelphia to help deal with a problem that’s overwhelming the U.S. justice system — poor mental health care in prisons, affecting up to 30 percent of those incarcerated.
Some of the problems our prisons face can be traced back to a pretty straightforward issue — our prisons are overcrowded. For instance, the prisons have been so overcrowded in California, the California prison system has been under a federal court’s oversight for years. And that court has become so frustrated by California’s lack of interest in the humane treatment of their prisoners, they recently ordered the number of prisoners cut by 27 percent within two years. The case that resulted in the court order began as the result of class action lawsuits addressing — surprise, surprise! — inadequate medical and mental health care in the prison system.
Which brings us to the sorry state of affairs in the juvenile prison system.
According to a recent New York Times article, about two-thirds of the nation’s approximately 93,000 juvenile inmates have at least one mental illness, citing surveys of youth prisons.
You’d think with such high rates of diagnosable mental health concerns in these children, you’d be offering them the highest mental health care possible, right? I mean, if anyone can be helped by such care early on, it’s likely to be children who are under the state’s care.
Sadly, that’s not the case. Just as with adults, we warehouse the children in facilities that not only do little to provide for their mental health needs, but continue to cut back in tough economic times:
At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.
Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.
The children and teens in the juvenile justice system are just that — children and teens. According to surveys, more than half have histories of exposure to violence, neglect, abuse and trauma. It is estimated that up to 75 percent of young offenders have a substance abuse disorder. Other research has shown that as many as 20 percent of this group also suffer from a serious mental disorder, like clinical depression or bipolar disorder.
There are no easy answers to these problems, especially in tough economic times. States have no money, so they cut back on these “luxury” items, like adequate medical and mental health care to those under its charge. And few people care about the criminal justice system in the U.S. (since most of us have never been to prison or have any direct experience with it). Yet you can tell a lot about a society by the way they treat not only their indigent, but also their criminals. Even more so when those criminals are our own children and teens.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Read the full article: Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System
4 comments
There’s much pathology in what is termed “normal” society, and the people who care little about those in prison most probably care little about themselves, think they themselves deserve little, so why should anyone else deserve anything good?
I’ve worked as a therapist in two adult prisons, and in several treatment settings with adolescents who had gotten entangled in the justice system (some classified as juveniles, some tried and sentenced as adults.) My experience has been that although both adult inmates and adolescent offenders often have serious mental and emotional health problems without which they’d probably never have gotten in trouble, way too many people who should know better – legislators and corrections professionals, as well as the general public – find it easier to ignore that fact and have a harshly punitive attitude toward these folks, as well as a distorted dualistic “us/them” way of seeing them. It’s both morally wrong and ineffective in terms of protecting society and making people less likely to re-offend after they’re released. Working in prison was a mixed experience – it was rewarding in terms of helping people with serious problems, of being free from the rigmarole of managed care, and of being able to do long-term and intensive work with clients instead of six-session drive-by counseling, but it was deeply frustrating because the system was pathological, and because often the rest of the institution was undoing our work as fast as we could do it, both because of the abusive issues of many staff (though there were also security staff who cared deeply and did their best to help inmates) and because, for the sake of making inmates easier to manage, the system was designed to stamp out the very qualities of internal locus of control, self-efficacy, and healthier boundaries we were trying to help them achieve.