The Institutionalized Truth: The Mentally Ill Behind Bars

At age fifteen, Armando Cruz stole tools from his neighbor’s garage and was forced into a psychiatric unit while his court proceedings took place. Throughout this time, Armando began to hear voices and paranoia overtook him. At age seventeen, prompted by the voices inside his head, he attacked a police officer. After two years of forced psychiatric treatment, Armando was sentenced to life in prison. There he committed suicide, unable to survive in the jail’s solitary confinement. Cruz needed help, not isolation. Armando was just one of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill in prisons today who turn to the prison system as their only source of refuge from homelessness.

During the 1940s, exposés revealed the horrible conditions within mental health hospitals. As the innards of these institutions were publicized, society was so perturbed by their high costs and dehumanization of the mentally ill that in the early 1960s the United States began deinstitutionalizing patients from these hospitals. Alongside this deinstitutionalization, the federal government worked towards starting community-based mental health centers, but incomplete funding limited their establishment. At this time, half of those released from the institutions were left with family or in adult homes, while the remaining half were left homeless, unable to access the limited community-based programs.

Many of them found themselves back in the governmental system relatively quickly. Unable to survive with little to no resources, many turned to criminal action, such as stealing food or other basic necessities. Without mental institutions to turn to, they were led to jail. Officers force many mentally ill who are unable to behave within the regimented order of the jail into solitary confinement. In more extreme cases, they can be sent to the psychiatric ward and be put on forced medication. Once they finish their time and are released, now accustomed to being on medication or in solitary confinement, they are unable to reacquaint themselves with normal society and they end up back in jail. According to a PBS Frontline documentary, mentally ill prisoners released from Rikers Island, a New York prison, receive none of the medications they were taking while confined, no referrals to mental health services, and only $1.50 in cash, They are set up to fail once back in society, driving them to cycle back into jail.

Moreover, wardens and officers are not equipped to deal with the mentally ill. Jails are not set up to be substitutes for mental health hospitals, yet they are being treated as the new asylums. Many of the mentally ill, for lack of a better living situation in normal society, actually want to live in prison. Historically known as a place of punishment, Jail is now perceived as a safe haven by the mentally ill. Prisons have become de facto mental health hospitals, but are ill-equipped for the role.

Training wardens and officers is one short-term solution to this problem. Officials who know how to properly work with the mentally ill will provide mentally ill prisoners with a much healthier experience in jail. But doing so would raise the cost of maintaining a psychiatric ward in prisons and might prove to be ineffective. The prison is a poisonous environment for most everyone, but it hits the mentally ill especially hard. The money being drained into the prison system should be diverted to instead expand community mental health centers as originally promised. These community-based centers would help to ensure that more mentally ill individuals are being provided the proper treatment and fair punishment for their crimes. Prisons should be reserved for criminals, not people like Armando Cruz.