Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder.
Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. Now updated to cover the latest developments in criminal justice reform, Insane is a stirring call to action for anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.Īn urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons from a veteran public radio journalist.Īmerica has made mental illness a crime. She also explores some of the most innovative solutions to the problem, showing that large-scale fixed at many levels of the mental health and criminal justice system are within reach. Roth provides the first comprehensive account of America's mental health crisis - and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She brings readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County Jail to a women's prison in Oklahoma with one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. As a broad national survey, it complements similar but more locally focused volumes such as Elizabeth Ford's Sometimes Amazing Things Happen.About the Book Insane takes journalist Alisa Roth deep inside our prisons and jails to show how and why they have become warehouses for people with mental illness, institutions rife with improper treatment and outright abuse. The work concludes with specific ideas for reform. Finally, the author details reasons for the revolving door that tends to pull mentally ill offenders back into the system. The following section evaluates how correctional facilities provide such care, concluding that failure is inevitable in a security-based, low-resource environment.
Initial chapters discuss how and why the mentally ill are easily drawn into the criminal justice system, including a history of U.S.
The book is organized around the process of criminalization. Roth mines an impressive array of interviews, case studies, official records, research, and statistics to support this view. As a result, correctional facilities have become mental health providers by default, exhibiting many of the poor conditions and abusive aspects of mental asylums of the past. prisons, and mass incarceration has aggravated the problem.
As reported here by veteran journalist Roth, mental illness affects more than half of the inmates in U.S.
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