Question

1. Why are there so many mentally ill persons housed in jails and prisons? What can be done to address the problem?
2. What are the dangers of prison overcrowding, as well as, strategies to overcome or minimize the dangers?

Answer 1

When a person is encountering any type of mental illness, the probability of such individuals to encounter the police rather than getting the medical help is quite high due to their mental inability to decide the right and wrong or to have the ability to control their actions and thus they end up in the jails or prisons. At present more than 2 million individuals suffering from the number of mental illnesses are booked in various legal cases. Some of the main reasons for these people to get jailed are as below-

Most of the people have the misconception that these mentally ill individual are a threat to society and can endanger the safety of others

There is a common intolerance in almost every society towards the difficult to abnormal behavior

Most of the countries do not facilitate the proper treatment, rehabilitation, and care to these individuals

The lack of or low access to mental health services

What can be done= The following things can be done=

Creating greater awareness and tolerance towards these people

Developing the wide medical service infrastructure to deal with the mental illness

To develop the plan to rehabilitate and care these individual

Initiating various community initiatives so that people can have positive behavior towards these individuals

Dangers of overcrowding= The main anger of prison overcrowding is that there will be more chances of criminal activities, clashes, violence, and mismanagement of the criminals. This will be difficult to monitor the progress and rehabilitation process of the criminals which is the main objective of imprisonment. This can also result in different types of mental illnesses and intolerant behaviors.

Strategies= The most viable strategy to overcome overcrowding of the jails is to initiate the community-based correction initiatives in which the individual are confined within the community and proper monitoring is done on his or her actions. The people with less serious crimes must be given early parole and other types of incentives to show good behavior.