The criminalization of innocent people occurs much too frequently, as patients are turned into prisoners. According to studies done in 2005, around 10% of prisoners in the United States were people with a severe psychiatric disorder (70% of youth in juvenile systems have a mental illness). This may not sound like a lot, but it is at the very least 218,000 individuals who should be receiving medical attention, not rotting in a cell while they continue to lose their minds. This number continues to rise today, more than 12 years later. Sadly, jails and prisons across the nation have been found to hold more mentally disabled patients than the largest psychiatric hospitals in the nation. To make matters worse, more than 1/5 of jails in the United States do not provide any mental health service at all. 84% of jails in the country have corrections officers that receive either little (less than three hours) or no training on how to deal with and treat prisoners with a mental illness. According to a study done in 1992, 29% of jails held mentally ill individuals who had no charges against them. These people were simply just waiting their psychiatric evaluations, an opening for them in the hospital, or for transportation to take them to a hospital. This is still legal today under many state laws (such as Kentucky, Wyoming, and Alaska) stating that “emergency detentions of individuals suspected of being mentally ill” are allowed. Not one of these hundreds of thousands of prisoners could control what actions they did to be stuck behind bars, yet it still occurs every day. For example, a lady in New Mexico was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was in a department store, and she started to rearrange the shelves because at that moment she thought she worked there. When the manager of the store asked her to leave, she slapped him, and later a police officer. She had what is called paranoid schizophrenia. With this disease, the person often believes that they are being followed by someone who wants to hurt them. This is why people with schizophrenia often go to jail for assault. Americans do have the right to plead insanity in court, but many of the mentally disabled do not do so, either because they are unaware of their rights, or they don’t know that it could help them.
Sadly, in today’s psychiatric system, patients who have criminal charges against them are often given priority psychiatric services. Often times because of this, a family will set up their ill loved one to get arrested so they can get the treatment they are seeking faster. As said by a California prison psychiatrist, “We are literally drowning in patients, running around trying to put our fingers in the bursting dikes, while hundreds of men continue to deteriorate psychiatrically before our eyes into serious psychoses. The crisis stems from recent changes in the mental health laws allowing more mentally sick patients to be shifted away from the mental health department into the department of corrections.” The prisons that do acknowledge mental illness often place the prisoners who are in severe condition in solitary confinement. They do this for the safety of the other prisoners, but it is not good for the minds of the people who are confined. Many of the prisoners with a mental illness end up committing suicide, because they are not mentally capable of handling the harsh living conditions of a prison. These are people who could have been helped, with an entire future ahead of them, but instead literally suffered to death.
Between the years 1990 and 2001, the length of a mentally ill patient’s time in hospitals across America decreased by 40%. There were 32% less psychiatric hospital facilities, and the amount of beds per each psychiatric facility decreased by 27%. This may sound like a good thing at first, being that more care would be focused on each patient, however the number of mentally ill patients keeps increasing, while the availability of help continues to decrease. This leaves many people waiting until something opens up, hoping that by that point they won’t be too far gone. In the year 2001, 61% of all of the patients in psychiatric wards were transferred to general hospitals, due to the great decrease in mental health facilities. A recent study was done, in which 31 patients in a psychiatric hospital were randomly selected, and it was discovered that 2,194 medication errors occurred throughout the 1,448 collective patients’ days spent in the facility. 58% of the medication errors that were made were determined to have the potential to cause severe harm and fatality. Recently, the government has made it more of a priority to check health care facilities for the quality of their care, however the quality of psychiatric inpatient treatment is still greatly behind the development of the other areas of health care. Psychiatric admissions decide on which patients to take first based on the fact that their purpose is to “serve as environments for addressing crises that cannot be handled in community settings, such as posing a danger to oneself or others.” It is therefore harder to determine who gets admitted and who has to wait, than for a medical-surgical facility. Patients have to be carefully analyzed for symptoms of being suicidal, homicidal, and many others that are hard to see from just one visit. Unfortunately, many people in need are denied until they will either be able to prove themselves, or if their mental state gets worse.