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My name is Addison Eli, I am currently a senior at Fishers High School and in January I will be moving to LA to study at Gnomon for Visual effects. I feel as though someone would enjoy reading this because as someone who is mentally ill, things like this have always intrigued me because if I was born in a different time I would be sent to a place like I will describe for a multitude of reasons, and I don’t want the suffering and pain of those before me and those who cannot speak for themselves go unnoticed.

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Jails have become a sort of mental hospital without the accurate name or proper training for those in charge. People can change, but being put in an endless cycle will do nothing to help them. There is a palpable lack of hope when you walk into a prison, slim to none actually believe in themselves enough or the system to believe that they can be rehabilitated. People who want prison reform, me included, have no idea exactly how difficult all of that would be. Yes, we free people, but at least in prison they would have meals, a place to live, and hopefully less of an access to drugs. As I’ve looked into the current problems in america’s prison system it all seems to become a cycle that just is a string of America’s problems. I begin to look into mental health in prisons that then goes into healthcare which turns into growing poverty that turns to systemic classism and racism that leads to a growing of the gap between the middle class and 1% and it just keeps going and people seem to use each of them as excuses for the other. In the way that someone will bring up a problem and it’s the argument that we can’t fix blank until blank happens and so I just have to wonder, will there ever be a place to start that doesn’t have more problems that need to be fixed before it. When and where will the change begin.

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Decline of mental hospitals - poor execution 

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Decline of mental hospitals - poor execution 

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The first mental institutions were created very slowly because the government  made it the responsibility of the state to pay for and make them. Ironically, just as it seems to be today, they would be house in jails if there was no room in mental hospitals or if they were still under construction (Larson). People used to go to mental hospitals for a range of things, such as epilepsy, homosexuality, Alzheimer’s, and alcoholism. Many of the things that people used to be put in a mental hospital for are now considered normal, or are taken care of with surgery or in a genuine medical hospital. Near the early 1900s mental hospitals came larger in the public eye and people were sending their children or parents or spouses there for nearly any abnormal. With the common case of the Oregon state hospital it had a population of 412 in 1880 and then by 1913 it had more than quadrupled and even opened a second hospital because they weren’t expecting such a large rise in the population (Larson). This was common in many mental hospitals at the time which led to overcrowding and many patients and staff suffered from that. In the 19th century mental health care was often just exposing the ill to normal situations, hoping that they would become normal because they were exposed to the environment. This treatment however, was shown to not work and in many mental hospitals there were hundreds coming in year after year but never leaving. In many scenarios, people were admitted when there was no hope for curing them, their family just didn’t want or could no longer, put up with them. Later, mental health professionals saw eugenics as a sort of population cure for the mentally ill. The definition of mentally ill in these populations tended to be thrown around very loosely, usually targeting people of color, the disabled, or the poor, tending to focus on the lower class, those who can’t pay for actual treatment. Eugenics did nothing to help the current population, but it would help the future and possibly help with the overcrowding of mental institutions. In 1907 a specifc board would congregate to decide if it would be needed to sterilize someone so they could not reproduce. More than 65,000 people in total were sterilized. Fast forward to the 1970s and many states are starting to decriminalize mental hospitals and set restrictions on who could be sent there, in theory, this idea would work. But where do these people end up? The answer is jail and prisons, and so the cycle begins again. Populations double after a while and the care for human life is going downhill just as the federal funding is, good idea, but the country continues to mess up the execution.

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Treatment of mentally ill- they're human, not animals 

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Treatment of mentally ill- they're human, not animals 

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Prison is meant solely for refinement and rehabilitation for those in society who cannot be trusted on their own. However, data collected from several prisons in 2000 found that there were more than 34,000 recorded assaults. So you could only imagine how those with no control over their emotions would feel in a place like this. From the same data log it was found that an estimated 350,000 inmates have a serious mental illness, and only 1.6 percent of those inmates felt as though they were being treated well putting their illness into consideration and receiving 24 hour care. Which means, that nearly 99% of people with mental illness don’t feel safe somewhere where they are supposed to be rehabilitating them. It is known that in a lot of prisons the guards aren’t properly equipped to deal with the mentally ill and that leads to a lot of abuse and misunderstanding in prison. Prison is bad enough and could actually cause people to become more susceptible to mental illnesses. Prisoners who endure solitary confinement will already make more anxious and have worse living conditions, add mental illness to that you’ve got madness on your hands. Its now wildly displayed how mental illness can be (usually to a more dramatic level) in popular media. Movies such as Shutter Island, Suicide Squad, and books like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Media depictions like this could hinder the perception of mentally ill in prison, seeing all of these people as “crazy” and a danger to society when in reality all they need is help and possibly hospitalization. The prison system itself and the psychology behind it leads to abuse in itself, this was shown in a experiment called the Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment executed by Phillip Zimbardo studying the effects of power (prison guards) over people who are no different than them (the prisoners) the study was supposed to go on for fourteen days but was shut down after six days due to ethical concerns and how evidently cruel the fake guards had been treating their peers. All of the participants were screened beforehand to make sure that they were mentally healthy so that there would hopefully be no mental health concerns during the study. The “prisoners” were embarrassed and abused for six days straight that it lead them into madness, it shows how just by being belittled in the prison system can deeply mess up someone’s psychology, prison itself has been set up in a way to belittle those who have committed crime, instead of rehabilitation(American Psychological Association). Those who are mentally ill are often treated as less than human, as if they have any control over their mental illness and treated like a burden and not a human. Prison takes away the humanity from those who may just need a therapist or medication for something that they have no way to control. Just because someone committed a crime that does not mean that they are less than human and usually they were forced to commit crimes because of their mental illness, either because of how hard it can be to get a job with mental illnesses or they were forced to steal or they thought they were in the right, a lapse of judgement. Their mental illness does not define them.

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Misunderstood in prison- not every prisoner is a serial killer 

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Misunderstood in prison- not every prisoner is a serial killer 

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In the 1940s and 50s it started to become important for prisoners to be rehabilitated instead of just punished. Prisons started to increase the amount of psychologists enlisted to help the efforts of rehabilitation because just punishing people for their mental illnesses doesn’t seem to work. Fast forward some time and in the 1980s when the prison population massively increased, by 2010 it went up to nearly 2.2 million people(Ronaldo). At that point it would be difficult to try to rehabilitate with such an increase in population and purely punishment is the way that many prisons. I assume that as a result of this mental illness became more common in prisons, being treated as less than human can do that to someone. At this time even though there were psychologists set up in many prisons they were mostly there to deal with trauma inside the prisons, and administer drugs. There weren’t there to be any sort of therapist or deal with any of the serious mental issues that were present before arrests. They were meant to deal with the very serious things like rape, mania, suicidal thoughts, death, things that would seem to make them a danger to themselves or the other prisoners, but when it came to just making sure that people’s mental health was under control, even if they weren’t manic, there was nearly no concern in most prisons. This isn’t necessarily their fault, many prisons don’t have the correcpt funding and are forced to cut corners just to get by. Most people would rather donate to schools or government  buildings so that makes prison funding a second thought of sorts. Jails are technically the largest mental health care centers in America but most people just see them as places to hold dangerous criminals, that they don’t want to help people who have committed crimes. So many times the case of mentally ill people in prisons is that they cannot afford actual treatment so they go to unhealthy habits to cope with mental illness like drug addiction or alcoholism and end up in trouble in that way. Not many people actively choose to commit crimes because they think it would be fun, a lot of people are forced to do it by those around them and the situation they are put in. Criminals cannot continue to just be seen as people with no morals or cares in the world but in reality they are people who deserve to rehabilitated and put back into the world, just because they broke the law doesn’t mean they deserve to rot in an institution.

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American Psychological Association. ‘‘A Prison Psychologist.’’http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/04/job-prison.aspx (accessed August 25, 2015).

Conway, Craig A. “A Right of Access to Medical and Mental Health Care for the Incarcerated.”http://www.law.uh.edu/healthlaw/perspectives/2009/(CC)%20Prison%20Health.pdf.National Commission on Correctional Health Care.” http://www.ncchc.org/.

Mumola, C. J., & Karberg, J. C. (2006). Drug use and dependence, state and federal prisoners, 2004.Washington,DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Peters, R. H., & Wexler, H. K. (Eds.). (2005). Substance abuse treatment for adults in the criminal justice system. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) #44. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse\Treatment.

“America's Long-Suffering Mental Health System.” Front Page, origins.osu.edu/article/americas-long-suffering-mental-health-system.

MYERS, RONALDO D. “Mental Health in Today’s Jails.” American Jails, vol. 32, no. 4, Sept. 2018, p. 4. EBSCOhost, www.statelib.lib.in.us/inspire/authenticate-eds.asp?url=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26AuthType%3dcookie%2cgeo%2curl%2cip%26geocustid%3ds8475741%26db%3df5h%26AN%3d131625294%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: a True Story of the Fight for Justice. Delacorte Press, 2018