Mental Illness In Prisons

In prisons and jails there are individuals that have mental illnesses, some of the individuals know they have a mental illness before ending up in the criminal justice system but some do not and end up getting diagnosed while incarcerated. This paper has three major parts about individuals that have mental illnesses that are incarcerated; how improving the mental health scanning individuals that are going into corrections more accuracy will be beneficial in providing the necessary care, how individuals with mental illness are treated in the correctional facilities and treatments they receive in correctional facilities, and should mentally ill individuals be in prison and jails or health facilities, how metal health facilities have closed down, so when an individual has a mental illness and disobeys the law ends up in the criminal justice system.

In 2012, approximately one hundred forty nine thousand inmates have mental illness out of three hundred fifty six thousand inmates. (Torrey et al., 2014) So, approximately forty two percent of inmates have some sort of mental illness. Some of the mental illness an individual could have in general is substance abuse, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, psychosis and psychotic disorders, developmental disabilities,

post-traumatic disorders, bipolar, schizophrenia, dysthymia/neurotic depression, impulse control, dementia, sexual disorders, paraphilia, sleep, movement and eating disorders, and pervasive developmental disorders. (Al-Rousan et al., 2017) All of the mental illnesses can be found in prisons and jails too.
Prisons need to improve their assessment process for mental illness in inmates when first arriving to the criminal justice system.

There was a research experiment done in Australian prison that aimed to find out what proportion of individuals have or had a mental illness, and the outcome of the assessment process if it ended in a referral to get appropriate treatment. The results of this experiment are that nineteen percent were diagnosed with a current mental illness and twenty percent were diagnosed with having a mental illness in their past. But, out of those percentages not many went for further evaluation to decide if they have more needs, and require more observation. (Schilders & Ogloff,

2014)
In New Zealand another research experiment was conducted, the objective was to see if the screening process was successfully diagnosing individuals that come into prison with a serious mental illness. This experiment had 734 subjects that participated in it, and it was divided into 2 parts, the first part only diagnosed 458 subjects with a mental illness which the routine mental health screening was conducted. On the second part was conducted 618 subjects were diagnosed with a mental illness which they used a more involved mental health screening which it was called Prison Model of Care. With the routine mental health screening: fifty percent diagnosed with schizophrenia and related psychoses, none percent diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, ten percent diagnosed with major depression, and twenty eight percent diagnosed with another mental illness. When Prison Model of Care was introduced the percentages of diagnoses of different kinds of mental illnesses were similar to the percentages of the routine mental health screening, but there were more subjects diagnosed in the second part of the experiment. (Pillai et al., 2016) This was a well develop idea and prosecuted very well and it shows that if the assessment process is more developed, then be able to diagnose more individuals with mental illnesses.
When individuals fall through the cracks, and is not diagnosed with the appropriate mental illness. The person that notices that something isn’t right with the prisoner is the guards. (Campbell, 2016) Guards are around the prisoners every day and can observe them more closely than a mental health professional. Individual with mental illnesses doesn’t always get noticed by the mental health professional because they don’t get to spend enough time with the individual to see what’s really going on. Also, sometimes prisoners don’t want to be diagnosed with a mental illness because it makes them look weak so they will hide their symptoms, to not be diagnosed with a mental illness.