Incarcerating Mentally Ill Individuals Research Term Paper Outline
The extent of the incarceration of mentally ill people.
Approximately 14,8 American adults suffer from severe mentally illness, and nearly 378,000 incarcerated have such illness (this numbers are given to the 2010 year but can be used as a seminal example) (Yohanna, 2013). Thereby, the enormous number of people who have the severe mental illness are imprisoned instead of being cared (Yohanna, 2013).
As the population grows and ages, so does the number of mentally ill people; as a number of cases of incarceration grows, so does the number of the incarceration of mentally ill people (Lipson, Turner, & Kasper, 2011).
The deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people is the right policy measure, which is also taken in the USA, but still has not proved himself because of the complexity of the issue (Yohanna, 2013).
ii. Observing the specificity of deinstitutionalization in the scope of the issue of the incarceration of mentally ill people with accordance to Daniel Yohanna's article (2013)
Issues raised by the incarceration of mentally ill people or related to the ignorance of this issue (statement of the problem):
Confining mentally ill offenders often exacerbate their illness, which proves that the incarcerating of them is the ineffective measure (Beseda, 2011).
It causes the re-imprisonment, which compounds the problem of the overrepresentation of mentally ill people in jails and prisons, and creates the vicious cycle (Beseda, 2011)
Individuals with mental illnesses are at high risk of being victimized by crime (Lipson, Turner, & Kasper, 2011), but they are perceived primarily as aggressors instead of victims. Such an approach and attitude can also exacerbate mental illness.
c. The incidental incarceration of mentally ill individuals turns jails into a dumping ground (Etter, Birzer, & Fields, 2011).
i. Jails and courts suffer from an excessive burden and waste their resources (Etter, Birzer, & Fields, 2011).
ii. Every trial of mentally ill people delays the development of mental health industry and strengthens the stigma and stereotypes regarding this issue (Gur, 2011).
d. Workers in law enforcement experience difficulties while dealing with such people because they lack specific knowledge and instructions (Lipson, Turner, & Kasper, 2011) and thereby unable to perform the role properly.
In the case of ignoring this issue by policemen or mental health service, such people are often put on the streets, where “the increased public interaction and access to addictive substances increased public stigma and criminalized mental illness” (Beseda, 2011, p.1). Police also tend to close their eyes to mentally ill individuals whose offences have already been once ignored by police and/or health facilities. Thereby, as far as mentally ill people are incarcerated again and again instead of being cured, workers in the field of law enforcement experience more and more lack of motivation and frustration (Gur, 2011). It results in the phenomenon that they may prefer to ignore offenses by mentally ill people rather than to report it to their command (Punch & James, 2016).
Which policy measures are necessary to decrease the number of incarcerated mentally sick and mitigate social stigmatization …
