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Psychological effects on people in prison
Papers on mental illness and prison
Mental illness within the jail system
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Different illnesses evolve around the world. Offenders enter with mentally illnesses when being incarcerated to a state prison or facilities. 55% males inmates and 75% females inmates are mentally ill in state prisons. Mentally ill inmates are often a threat towards other or themselves and face challenges such as being by themselves or being under medication or face abuse. Mental ill inmates can be a danger to other inmates. They often tend to attack other inmates by stabbing them with self made objects, physical fighting inmate on inmate, and brutally beating them to death. The offenders can be abusive towards other inmates by threatening them to do something they do not intend to do. They can attack guards and the people who try to help …show more content…
The abuse the inmates receive from the guards are they are “being doused with chemical sprays, shocked with electronic stun guns and strapped for hours to chairs or beds.” -Timothy Williams. These “security guards also taunt these mentally ill inmates until they scream, bang their head against the wall or defected in their cells.” -George Mallinckrodt. Guards take advantage of these unstable inmates because these offender do not understand what may be happening so they are an easy target for the guards. For example, there has been a case study in Miami Florida June 2012. The death of a mentally inmate Darren Rainey 50, occurred at Dade Correctional Institution when he was thrown into a steaming shower left to die by prison officers. Rainey was taken to a shower by prisons officers who locked the door and left him in the shower for two hours. Staff arrived at the scene to remove Rainey from the shower and performed CPR. His skin began to peel off due to the exposure of water and humidity. The nurse who took his temperature resulted in 102 degrees rather than normal 98.6 degrees. 12 hours after his death his temperature was 94 degrees. Investigators ruled his death accidental and could not prove if the shower was hot the day he fainted. These officers had done it to other mentally ill inmates and had got away with them as well as the Darren Rainey case. This case proves how …show more content…
These prisons help them get stable by providing treatment programs to them for they can learn how to become stable, have self-control and to function properly. After these mentally ill inmates serve their time, jails that are associated with community clinics who provide treatment, on-site screening and follow ups after these inmates have been released. These offenders have a challenge of being in isolation or solitary due to being harmful by attacking inmates or prison guards and also can cause self- harm to
A reality where the prisoner is dehumanized and have their rights and mental health abused. “I have endured lockdowns in buildings with little or no heat; lockdowns during which authorities cut off the plumbing completely, so contraband couldn’t be flushed away; and lockdowns where we weren’t allowed out to shower for more than a month” (Hopkins 154). A prisoner currently must survive isolation with improper shelter in the form of heat. Issues compound with a lack of running water and bathing, a proven severe health danger, especially for someone lacking proper nutrients such as a prisoner in lockdown. These abuses of physical well being then manifest into damage of prisoners’ mental well being. “Perhaps I should acknowledge that the lockdown-and, indeed, all these years-have damaged more than I want to believe” (Hopkins 156). Even for the experienced prisoner the wrath of unethically long lockdowns still cause mental damage. Each and every isolation period becomes another psychological beating delivered as the justice system needlessly aims to damage the already harmed inmates. The damage is so profound inmates even recognize the harm done to them by their jailors. An armed and widely used psychological weapon, the elongated lockdown procedures decimate mental health each and every time
The tour at Twin Towers Correctional Facility was a great experience. I had the opportunity to experience a brief overview of what inmates with mental illness go through everyday in jail. These inmates are mainly grouped by the severity of the crime they committed, severity of their mental illness, and sexuality. The tour took place in one of the twin towers, which has seven floors and each floor houses different level of inmates. The most severe mentally ill inmates, who have no free time, are housed in the seventh floor. These are the inmates that throw “gases” the most frequently, which are any form of bodily fluids/solids towards the staff. Examples of the typical gases are feces, urine, and blood. As the floors drop, the inmates’ degree of being dangerous to themselves and/or others decreases. Once inmates are put into a certain floor, inmates have the opportunity to go down floors based on their cooperation with personnel and if their mental illness appears to be controlled. Psychiatrists evaluate every inmate upon entering the facility and are able to see his or her progress. Some inmates never make it out of the facility even though they did their time for the crime they committed. These inmates are too mentally ill to be released to the outside world. In addition, inmates wear different color clothes and that lets jailers know how to behave around different inmates. Some are more dangerous than others; therefore, a jailer needs to be more careful with some inmates than others. Also, some inmates do not wear clothes because they are under suicide watch, thus they only wear a blue suicide vest.
Australian Institute of Criminology, 2007, The identification of mental health disorders in the criminal justice system, prepared by Ogloff, J.R.P., Davis, M.R., Rivers, G. and Ross, S., Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra.
illnesses. It is estimated that about 50 percent of prison population suffers from some sort of mental illness. The most common mental illnesses that mostly make up this population are anxiety, antisocial personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder.
There are some inmates in jails and prisons that have a mental illness. It has been estimated that 10% to 16% of at adults in U.S prisons and jails have some kind of a mental illness (Mackain and Messer. p.89). It was calculated that 10% of male and 18% of females have a serious mental disorder (Mackain and Messer. p.89)...
In the article “The Mentally Ill Are Mishandled by the Justice System”, Shannon explains how there are approximately 3000 mentally ill inmates in a prison who are unjustfuly sent there. Many mental illnesses are cause by post traumatic experiences such as being abused as a child or being sexually abused as a child. She also explains how many times judges and officers do not fully understand why mentally ill people do what they do, therefore they misunderstand the person’s actions and send them.
Thousands of people statewide are in prisons, all for different reasons. However, the amount of mental illness within prisons seems to go unaddressed and ignored throughout the country. This is a serious problem, and the therapy/rehabilitation that prison systems have do not always help those who are mentally ill. Prison involvement itself can contribute to increased suicide (Hills, Holly). One ‘therapy’ that has increased throughout the years has been the use of solitary confinement, which has many negative effects on the inmates. When an inmate has a current mental illness, prior to entering into the prison, and it goes undiagnosed and untreated, the illness can just be worsened and aggravated.
The current prison and criminal justice system has not proven to be helpful in rehabilitating offenders and preventing recidivism. To successfully alter this situation it is important to understand what steps and measures are available to assist those who find themselves imprisoned. The techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy have proven to be effective in treating depression, anxiety and drug addictions among other things. Analyzing the techniques developed in cognitive behavioral theory and applying them to psychotherapy in prison environments can assist in making improvements in the prevention of criminal activity, rates of incarceration and safety and security of the general population. The literature shows that the use of cognitive behavioral therapy has been effective in the treatment of a variety of criminal offenders.
were males, 7221, and the rest 564 were females. In order to see if the participates had any sort of mental illness they looked at self reported treatment, related to mental health (Biltz). The results of this study found that the amount of inmates that participating in this study had a disproportionally number of inmates with mental healthy that were physically victimized. According to this study prisons are a violent and unsafe place for people who suffer from mental illness (Biltz). Male inmates who suffered from any form of mental illness were nearly 1.6 times more likely to be physically victimized while in prison. Females inmates who had a mental illness were even more likely to suffer from physical victimization, they were nearly 2 times more likely than male inmates with mental illness (Blitz). Inmates that were African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be physically victimized either by inmates or staff.
Prior to taking this course, I generally believed that people were rightly in prison due to their actions. Now, I have become aware of the discrepancies and flaws within the Criminal Justice system. One of the biggest discrepancies aside from the imprisonment rate between black and white men, is mental illness. Something I wished we covered more in class. The conversation about mental illness is one that we are just recently beginning to have. For quite a while, mental illness was not something people talked about publicly. This conversation has a shorter history in American prisons. Throughout the semester I have read articles regarding the Criminal Justice system and mental illness in the United States. Below I will attempt to describe how the Criminal Justice system fails when they are encountered by people with mental illnesses.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and of that over sixty percent of jail inmates reported having a mental health issue and 316,000 of them are severely mentally ill (Raphael & Stoll, 2013). Correctional facilities in the United States have become the primary mental health institutions today (Adams & Ferrandino, 2008). This imprisonment of the mentally ill in the United States has increased the incarceration rate and has left those individuals medically untreated and emotionally unstable while in jail and after being released. Better housing facilities, medical treatment and psychiatric counseling can be helpful in alleviating their illness as well as upon their release. This paper will explore the increasing incarceration rate of the mentally ill in the jails and prisons of the United States, the lack of medical services available to the mentally ill, the roles of the police, the correctional officers and the community and the revolving door phenomenon (Soderstrom, 2007). It will also review some of the existing and present policies that have been ineffective and present new policies that can be effective with the proper resources and training. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate that the criminalization of the mentally ill has become a public health problem and that our policy should focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
This essay intends to address the role that state agencies, both within the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and more broadly the institutions of education, employment and health, play in supporting and implementing diversionary programs for offenders with mental health problems. Mental health is clearly one of the most critical issues facing the Australian and New South Wales (NSW) CJS with research indicating that offenders with mental health problems constitute the majority of those within the prison system. The current strategies for diversion will be critically evaluated in order to determine their effectiveness with regard to the delivery and production of justice, cultural sensitivity for Indigenous Australians will also be considered. The social construction of mental illness and the associated process of stigmatisation of this particular group will be explored in conjunction to explain why society still fails to prevent the mass entry of people with mental health issues into the traditional CJS.
We as a society have been forced to think that everyone in jail deserves what they get, we over look the fact that some have a mental illness that they can’t control over their actions .Taken all we have learned, this information has let me see what goes on, not only in jail, but in society. In this article it talks about people who have mental illness being treated improperly in jail and the rate of suicides is high do to the fact that people are not able to care for himself and feel that they do not belong there. When looking at videos in class I was able to understand why some people do what, some people hurt others and themselves without their control. The main issue of the article is that people with mental illnesses are being sent to jail for crimes that they may not have control over as they are sent to jail they are treated inappropriate by other inmates and guards that don't know how to handle them. The fact that some inmates ha...
There are two ethical systems that should be considered when dealing with how inmates with mental health issues should be treated. The most prominent and secular system is the Ethics of Care system. It is defined in the New World Encyclopedia as being a “type of virtue ethics” and is based on the individual being an “interdependent, relational being” where benevolence, care, and mercy is emphasized (“Ethics of care,” 2017). It is the moral obligation for correctional officers in the jail or prison systems to care for the inmates they watch over. Inmates are dependent on the officers for their food, protection, and care.
Mental health and the criminal justice system have long been intertwined. Analyzing and understanding the links between these two subjects demands for a person to go in to depth in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, because there are many points of view on whether or not a person’s criminal behavior is due to their mental health. Some believe that an unstable mental state of mind can highly influence a person’s decision of committing criminal actions. Others believe that mental health and crime are not related and that linking them together is a form of discrimination because it insinuates that those in our society that suffer from poor mental health are most likely to become a criminal due to their misunderstood behavior not being considered a normality in society. In this report I will go into detail of what mental health and mental illness is, what the differentiates a normal and a mentally unstable criminal, give examples of criminal cases where the defendant’s state of mind was brought up, introduce theories surrounding why one would commit crimes due to their mental health, and lastly I will discuss how the criminal justice system has been modified to accommodate mental health issues.