Mentally ill strain Georgia prisons
March 26th, 2008Inmates should be getting community health services, task force says
By Andy Miller in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Inmates in Georgia’s prisons and jails are three times as likely to have a serious mental illness as members of the general public, according to a state task force led by the state’s Supreme Court chief justice.
The panel said the overrepresentation is caused by a lack of community mental health services, which causes people to get trapped in the criminal justice system instead of getting needed treatment. About fifteen percent of the population of the jails and prisons have illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, compared with five percent of all Georgians.
“Large numbers of people with mental illness repeatedly make their way into our courtrooms, our jails and our prisons,” Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears said recently in public remarks. “Mental illness is not a crime. But these citizens too often fall through the cracks of our social safety net. When they do, they enter a vicious cycle of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, release and re-offense.”
… The task force’s recommendations include making sure people with mental illness have proper medication; providing housing for mentally ill people who are homeless; and starting a program of special case managers who would help link newly jailed offenders to community services.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under criminal justice, housing, law, law enforcement, mental health.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Email This Post
Our RSS Feed
July 5th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Has anyone thought to check out the mentally ill placed in Georgia nursing homes? Especially in rural Medicaid based nursing homes? The state’s PASRR program (Preadmission Screening/Resident Review) is a good program but in some cases overloaded. There are also mentally ill nursing home residents that should have PASRR but were given a diagnosis that made it easier to enter long term care without state psychiatric assistance. By placing a primary diagnosis of a severe medical problem or any form of dementia, hospitals can hide the patient’s true mental illness (MI) until placed in a nursing home. Then it is left to the nursing home to seek the mental health support for the resident.
You would be surprised as to how many MI residents are in nursing homes that cannot be placed in communities and have been forced out of hospitals such as the 7 Georgia Regional State psychiatric hospitals. Other hospitals throughout the state have been known to do this form of placement also.