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By Michelle Lugalia-Hollon, Contributing Editor, Global Health
In an unprecedented national call-to-action to lower the number of people with mental illness in the jails, the Council of State Governments Justice Center (CSG) and the National Association of Counties (NaCo) convened leaders in behavioral health and criminal justice at the end of last year. In the United States, where dealing with mentally ill citizens has caused much hand wringing and little sustainable progress over the last few centuries, this is a big deal.
The mentally ill have cycled through various institutions, from asylums to nursing homes, which have all assumed and lost the responsibility for treating them depending on the reform of the day. Though evidence-based solutions have been well researched, implemented and documented, years of effort to adequately address severe mental illness have failed to take root primarily due to inadequate financial support for well-meaning reforms. Across the nation, as best-practices have continued to be gutted, these primarily poor and under-resourced individuals have lost access to the mental health and social services that can keep them healthy, housed and employed. Without access to these vital services mentally ill citizens are left to survive in communities where their unmanaged mental illnesses drive their repeated involvement in illegal behaviors that lead to their arrests. This criminalization of mental illness has led to a disproportionate number of these citizens detained in jails and prisons. Consequently, prisons and jails have become the largest and most utilized mental health institutions across the United States. (more…)
