Mentally Ill & Crime

The state of public mental health care is deplorable in this country, a condition we continue to ignore while either incarcerating those with mental illness, offering them respite in inadequate and often abominable shelters, or all to typically by dismissing the problem as unsolvable. The mentally ill often comprise a large portion of the prison and homeless populations in this country, either from perpetrating minor crimes or from a lack of newly developed medications which might alleviate their condition enough to allow them to find employment and maintain a somewhat stable life. However, present laws regarding the mentally ill are often inadequate to ensure law enforcement has appropriate methods for dealing with their plight and in the richest nation in the world our medical insurance coverage for the mentally ill is minimal or not available. In Out of the Shadows, author E. Fuller Torrey reports, "we have 5.5 million Americans who suffer from acute mental illnesses. Of these approximately 159,000 are imprisoned mainly for minor crimes (shoplifting and such); 150,000 are homeless (about 1/3 of those who are homeless)" (The Mentally 1).

Each state has laws, or a lack of them, when it comes to coping with the problem of the mentally ill who do not have adequate care or shelter. Unfortunately, many states have inadequate methods and policies in place for dealing with the mentally ill and most end up in jails, on the streets, or i

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t serious illness here and not criminal intent. Robison had to commit murder to be considered worthy of state tax dollars in Texas and he is not alone on death row when it comes to having a serious mental illness. In fact, the state that found it so difficult to find money to help get Larry the treatment he really needed spends tens of millions of dollars every year trying to prosecute those who are criminally insane after they commit violent crimes, "Texas doesn't take care of its mentally ill. A lot of states don't but most all of them in the nation take better care of them than Texas does. Texas doesn't want to put out the money to do preventative treatment. It would rather spend the money on executions. In Robison's case this seems quite literally true. Texas consistently falls within the bottom 10 states in per capita expenditures on mental health. Texas spends $2 million prosecuting the average capital murder case. Imagine what that kind of funding could have done for the mentally ill in Texas since 1982. Five Texas death row inmates will be executed in august. In three of those cases, the inmates exhibit evidence of severe mental illness or retardation" (King 9). The present mental health system in this country

Category: Psychology - M