Mentally Ill and Locked Up: An Alternative to Throwing Disabled People in Jail

As I was perusing the interwebs to find fodder for this blog I came across this amazing website created by Jenn Ackerman. The site has an essay, a photo essay and a film about mentally ill people in America's prison system. (The picture above is not from Ackerman's site.)

A disproportionately large number of inmates in the US have a mental health diagnoses. This is not entirely surprising as individuals with mental illness have a harder time finding a job and generally struggle to be fully integrated into American society. Even after deinstitutionalization that culminated in the 1980s people with mental illness tend to be segregated and isolated.

Ms. Ackerman's website focuses on a prison program in Kentucky called Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit (CPTU) at the Kentucky State Reformatory. CPTU is essentially a mental health facility located within the Kentucky prison. Ms. Ackerman's essay details the efforts made by employees and administrators at the CPTU to create a supportive and therapeutic environment for mentally ill inmates. But even those individuals overseeing the project seem to think that prison is not a good place for mental health consumers. Prison conditions seem to exacerbate mental health symptoms. Now that the US has switched over to a punitive rather than rehabilitative model of sentencing and prison administration, the institutions of prisons seem uniquely ill-suited to handle mentally ill inmates in need of treatment. CPTU has no doubt taken some steps in the right direction, but it is very far from ideal.

There is a prejudice in our society that people who are mentally ill are inherently dangerous and belong in a prison setting. Even assuming that all of the mentally ill inmates at the Kentucky State Reformatory are guilty of the crimes accused (an unsafe assumption for a variety of reasons), the perception about the mentally ill is unfounded. Mentally ill individuals are not inherently dangerous. It is in no way clear to me that as a population they are more dangerous than any other segment of society. The problem is rather a failing of social institutions in our society to make a place for people with mental disabilities.

A great article that was published in the New York Times Magazine back in 1999 reveals the various ways that American civil society has failed to include individuals with mental illness. These failings, rather than the individuals with mental illness, bear a large portion of the responsibility for any dangerous behavior. Once we recognize the social nature of disability the goal becomes to change the institutions and social practices that marginalize disabled individuals and prohibit them from participating in society. Simply locking up everyone who behaves outside the norm is not going to work. As Ms. Ackerman's essays and photos reveal, it is cruel and it won't work. Providing greater support and more avenues for meaningful participation and citizenship will work.