Roughly 5% of all adult Americans suffer from a serious illness according to a 2012 report by a division of the 2012 US Department of Health and Human Services. A 2006 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that over half of all prison and jail inmates have some sort of mental health issue. An estimated 1.24 Million suffer from mental health issues which are over 4 times that number in 1998. This research indicates that mental illness is overrepresented within the criminal justice system. The current rates indicate that two to four times that of the normal
Gangs in prison There are gangs in every prison and the guards have to keep a look out for them; recruiting new inmates “fresh meat” as the inmates call them. They victimise an inmate to join their gang. Gangs are viewed as a means of survival in a prison starved of any morals, and murder and violence is just normal routine. Many prisons are let off with being the worst prisons in the world due to the upkeep of the prison not through the violence decreasing. Venezuela’s prison La Sabeneta is one of the worst prisons due to that they have one guard to every 150 inmates.
Also, there were rarely any customers so the store was as dead as a ghost town. Another bad feature was that none of the other employees were very helpful at all. Every time I would ask another associate for help, I was always referred to the supervisor. When I would call the supervisor, the supervisor would refer me to the associates. I was caught in the middle and was depicted as someone that was not worth talking to.
When the mental health facilities were shut down, police and prisons are left to deal with the mantally ill patients. As these patients were released from the hospitals, due to their lack of mental health, many would become homeless and eventually cycle into the prison systems. Once in the prisons, these mentally ill individuals are offered much less care than what many of them need in treating their different types of disorders. Group therapy in such prisons is very informal and conducted in an uptight environment. In these sessions the inmates are kept in chains and separated by jail cells in an open room, as opposed to a patient friendly atmosphere the psychiatric hospitals are able to provide.
I was expecting there to be a world of difference, but there wasn’t. In the movie, there was racial difference, where as the head nurse in the book was small and white, and in the movie, it was Whoopi Goldberg, now everyone knows she is big and black. The detail that was in the book wasn’t necessarily shown in the movie. The story line was the same, in the book and in the movie. The story of Girl Interrupted, was basically this, its about a girl who is admitted into a psychiatric hospital.
The justice system needs to adopt new rehabilitation strategies to make sure prisoners can reintegrate into society. In an article by Jeremy Coylewright he states that in the year 2002 over 600,000 inmates were released from the state and federal prisons. This averages out to be about 1,600 people a day! These numbers are very disappointing when you compare them to the recidivism rate. About half of the criminals released were previously incarcerated at least once and about two thirds of those released are expected to be rearrested for another felony within three years of their release date.
Half of the selected boys were assigned to be prisoners and the other half were assigned to be a guard. It all started when arrest by the city police blindfolded and took into the jail cell one at a time and greeted by the warden which conveyed the seriousness of their offense. The “prisoners” were arrested by a police car, were fingerprinted, blindfolded and put in a cell, then they were searched and stripped naked given a uniform, a number and had a chain placed around one foot. The other participants were “guards” in which they wore uniforms and were given clubs. The guards were given no training on how to be guards and how to do their job.
Many people are diagnosed with psychological problems without even knowing about the disorder. They live their lives without any awareness of their problems, and do not get treated for it. In Hosseini’s novel, “The Kite Runner” it is controversial whether such psychological problems can be recovered through appropriate treatment or through the character’s own abilities and skills. Baba, Assef, and Sohrab deal with psychological problems throughout the story. It is intended that these characters are suffering from mental problems as each of them show the symptoms of their disorders.
As a consequence it has been notices that John does not talk much and likes to stay indoors. John moved into smaller house because the previous house was too big for John to maintain on his own. As a result John has not got a landline at home. Moreover he does not know how to use a mobile phone or the internet. Since John moved he lives further away from his friends and family and does not have many roles to fulfil such as, babysitting his grandchildren or holding small social gatherings for friends and families.
The current structure of this system is failing terribly. To take people, strip them of their possessions and privacy, expose them to violence on a daily basis, restrict their quality of life to a five by seven-foot cell, and deprive them of any meaning to live. This scenario is a standard form of punishment for violent offenders, although not suitable for nonviolent offenders. Today, almost 70% of all prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses. U.S. States are spending an average of a hundred million dollars per year on new prisons and all U.S. taxpayers front the bill for a system that is not working.