Mary Beth Pfeiffer's Crazy In America

In the book Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of our Criminalized Mentally Ill, Mary Beth Pfeiffer argues that the government has failed America's mentally ill population. She shows how, after the closing and downsizing of many mental hospitals, there have not been sufficient programs to take care of the mentally ill and help them live normal lives. Instead, these people often relapse and end up in jail, where their psychotic outbursts are punished harshly, exacerbating their illnesses. The author presents six anecdotes of mentally ill people suffering due to stays in prison or encounters with the police. In each case, she first gives a background on the person's life, then tells the story of how he or she first began getting into legal trouble, and then describes the events leading up to the incident and the incident itself. Finally, she

generalizes his or her fate to the fates of many others like him or her, providing evidence from official reports to support her claim. In each of these parts, Pfeiffer uses different rhetorical strategies and elements, which come together to form an argument that is as compelling as it is harrowing.
In the first section of each part of the book, the author describes in detail the childhood of the subject of the story. She discusses his or her family, school experience, and any early signs of mental illness. This provides a context that helps to understand the person's actions throughout the rest of the narrative. It also makes it easier to see the world from his or her point of view , and to sympathize with him or her. These chapters are full of adjectives that help picture the situation. In some of the stories, the tone begins as peaceful, describing a happy early childhood. However, as symptoms of mental illness begin to appear, it becomes unsettling. In some of the stories, the tone is unsettling from the start. Pfeiffer creates this effect by describing the strange actions and feelings of the people. Towards the end of these sections, it becomes ominous. She uses sentences like “what his friends did not know was that Luke was wracked with self-doubt.”
The author goes on to describe how the subject of the story first began acting in a way that was suspicious or even illegal. The ominous tone introduced towards the end of the previous section pervades throughout this one. Suspense grows as it becomes more and more clear that a run-in with the police is inevitable. Pfeiffer shows how the fear and pain that the people experience lead them to take drugs or commit violent acts, which end up making them feel worse. She draws a contrast between the vicious criminals they appear to be and the insecure and troubled people they really are.
The story transitions to its next section when the person ends up in jail or when a police officer confronts him or her.

The author uses logos by outlining step-by-step how the police or the correctional officers treated the inmate. She points out all of the times when something went wrong and explains why this had a negative effect and how it could have been avoided. Using this strategy, she proves that the police or correctional officers, the authorities, and the system failed to rehabilitate the inmate, and instead caused him or her damage. Pfeiffer also employs a great deal of pathos in this section, using charged words and phrases such as “tension,” “conflict,” “coerced,” and “deprivation” to describe what the inmates had to suffer. She also uses phrases with great emotional charge; for example, jail staff saw the inmates as “less than human.” She combines the perspectives of the people, their fellow inmates, and their family members to depict the conditions that they had to suffer and the fear and despair that they felt. The climax of this section occurs when the inmate either dies or suffers a horrible

injury.
The author's argument consists of a series of anecdotes which, by themselves, are not enough to prove her point. However, she also includes evidence to show that the same things that happened to the people she describes also happened to thousands of others across the nation. Although she uses pieces of evidence throughout the book, it is concentrated in the final section. Here, Pfeiffer makes an appeal to ethos and logos using statistics and quotes from official reports. For example, she includes the following quote from a statement by the Mental Health Association in Texas: “many persons with mental illnesses were simply shifted from state hospitals to... prisons.” This strengthens her argument by showing that people are suffering due not only to abusive individuals, but also to a broken system.
Mary Beth Pfeiffer illustrates what it is like to be a mentally ill person in one of America's jails through the true stories of six people from different parts of the country. She begins by writing about the person's illness and how it got them into trouble, using descriptions to help the readers see things from his or her perspective. She then creates a shocking depiction of the horrors of life in jail. Finally, she uses evidence to prove that what she is describing is a major problem that affects many people. Overall, the argument is effective. The only issue is that the tone is sometimes very accusatory, making the book seem a bit biased.