the crime report

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One of the more troubling issues I have encountered in my 15 years of the practice of psychiatry is the frequency with which agencies work to evade responsibility and accountability for the clients they are supposed to serve.  No agency is immune to this problem, but in my experience, one of the most egregious situations goes something like this:

Joe is a 33 year old man seen on the grounds of a local elementary school. He is not recognized by school staff, and the police are called.  Upon approach by police officers, he appears not to understand their direction to leave the grounds.

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The problems of mentally ill offenders really  start once they leave prison

Five years after Victor left New York’s Downstate Correctional Facility, he tried to kill himself by drinking a container of bleach.

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Pantagraph reporter Edith Brady-Lunny was a 2010 John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Fellow. Below she explains her techniques of reporting the story.

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Senior Vice President

WestCare

(702) 385-2090

Nevada

leslie.balonick@westcare.com

Read more of Mark’s work at his blog D.A. Confidential.

There has been much talk of closing prisons here in Texas.  The Crime Report covered that issue a week or so ago, and the local paper has also written about it.  From what I’ve read, the move seems budgetary rather than a result of some philosophical shift, and as I sit down to contemplate the subject a case that came up in court this week seems like a good representation of how I feel.

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Drug courts and similar alternatives to traditional courtrooms are  skyrocketing around the US.  But some argue they are “wrong-headed” policy.

One Friday in 2002, I spent several days in a drug court in San Jose, California. It was not a typical drug court. All 50 defendants had been diagnosed as mentally ill and seriously addicted. The grinding poverty and degradation of their lives was on searing display that day: etched in crumbled, pain-filled, black faces; in the slumped shoulders of battered, middle-aged Mexican-American men with blank eyes who knew they were already dead; and in the rotting teeth and thigh-wide arms of pasty, bloated white women woefully old before their time.

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This 2007 report examines the reasons behind the United States’ “exploding” incarceration rate, the difficulty of properly treating drug addiction in prison and recommendations for more equitable punishment.

Read Unlocking America