Editorial: Help — not jail — needed for people with mental illness
April 15th, 2008Georgia must fund team approach for troubled defendants
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The editors take the state of Georgia to task for failing to provide adequate support for community health care. The result, they say, is a systemic failure of the community mental health system that causes people with mental illness to end up incarcerated in state prisons and jails because they can’t get help anywhere else.
“Deinstitutionalization,” the movement to get patients out of state hospitals, has been around for about 40 years. But Georgia, like other states, has failed to ensure that severely mentally ill patients have access to the treatment they need in communities where they live. Little of the savings from scaling back care at hospitals was transferred to provide an adequate level of spending on community services, which 180,000 Georgians now depend on for basic mental health care.
… At a minimum, the state should consider a mental health budget at least equal to the annual corrections budget. Failure to upgrade mental health care means those same prisons will keep filling up with people whose only major crime is being mentally ill.
See earlier story here: Mentally ill strain Georgia prisons.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, criminal justice, housing, law, law enforcement, mental health.
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