Psychiatric Prison Analysis

The mentally ill are often incarcerated instead of being treated, in American prisons and jails they housed an estimated 356,268 inmates with severe mental illness in 2012 (Swanson, 2012). That figure is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals in the same year—about 35,000 people (Swanson, 2012). Beginning in the 1950s there was a movement to deinstitutionalize mental health facilities when the public psychiatric hospitals in the early 20th century came to be criticized for inhumane and disturbing treatments. Prisons are poorly equipped to properly deal with mental illness. Inmates with mental illnesses are more likely than others to be held in solitary confinement, and many are raped, commit suicide,