Criminal Justice System Analysis

Background There is an important connection between mental health and the criminal justice system. This connection between the two areas relies heavily on how to treat someone who has a mental illness when they become involved with police or anyone in criminal justice. Many times people with mental illnesses are overlooked by the system, and are not given the proper medical care to treat their mental illnesses or disorders. Most criminal justice professionals, or police for example, either do not know how to deal with a mental illness, or they do not care or believe that it is a real problem (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017). Instead of giving these people treatment, they are often just thrown in jail without a second look at their mental health – which is often times the root cause of the problem. This has lead to an influx of people in the criminal justice system with

According to a statistic from the Bureau of Justice (2006), about 64% of current inmates in the criminal justice system have a mental health problem, and 25% had a history of mental illness that was not reported or taken into account. These people are actually not problematic in the sense that they pose a serious threat to the public, they just have a mental illness that is just not always understood by those who encounter them. Most of the time, those who are encountering them in this case are police – not a medical professional. The major problem here is that there is not an effective response being used by the criminal justice system, and there are not proper medical treatments in place for these people leading to a higher prevalence year after year (James & Glaze, 2006). This is clearly an issue that needs a lot of attention because even though there are proposed solutions, little is actually being done to make this epidemic