Mental illness prisoners

A prisoner can be compelled to take psychiatric medication in only two circumstances. First if he suffers from a serious mental illness that renders him mentally incompetent to make his own medical decisions, prison medical authorities are permitted to forcibly treat the prisoner, so long as the treatment is in the best interests of the prisoner and complies with due process. Second, a prisoner whose mental illness leads him or her to engage in dangerous behavior that threatens to harm other prisoners or prison staff, may be forcibly treated with psychotropic medication.This ruling is based on the unique safety and security issues within prisons. 

O ur own use of prisoners, the institutionalized retarded, and the mentally ill to test malaria treatments during World War II was generally hailed as positive, making the war everyone s war. Likewise, in the late 1940 s and early 1950 s, the testing of new polio vaccines on institutionalized mentally retarded children was considered appropriate. Utilitarianism was the ethic of the day. ... 

As usual in those days in the Soviet Union, the accused confirmed everything that they were supposed to - among other things, that the Sonderkommando 10a of Einsatzgruppe D, led by SS-Sturmbannfiihrer Kurt Christmann, had been killing Soviet prisoners with Diesel exhaust in murder vans since the fall of 1942.14 Soviet witnesses confirmed the use of murder vans to eliminate the mentally ill (pp. 4ff). The claim at the heart of all the testimony was that the highly toxic Diesel exhaust gas had caused the death of those locked into the vans. Since this claim cannot be true (for the carbon monoxide content and hence the toxic, i.e., nontoxic nature of Diesel exhaust, see the chapter by Fritz Berg, this volume), it is only reasonable to question the credibility of the rest of the witness statements as well. 

In 1997, in Kansas v. Leroy Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court declared States have a right to use psychiatric hospitals to confine certain sex offenders once they have completed their prison terms, even if those offenders do not meet mental illness... 

The suspicion that, in the final analysis, mental illness is a disease sui generis, unique among diseases, is confirmed by the fact that it is the only disease believed to be capable of causing and excusing crime. In possessing this property, mental illness combines functions previously attributed to the Devil and God. Also, mental illness is the only disease that justifies, as hospitalization, the preventive detention of persons deemed dangerous to themselves and/or others and the incarceration of persons deemed to be sexual predators who have served their prison sentences. 

One of the important differences between a person accused of crime and one accused of mental illness is that the former is often allowed bail, whereas the latter never is. This distinction too may be found in the Inquisition. The question of bail for suspected heretics was considered by the fifteenth[Pg.53]

Many addicts who end up in prison are mentally ill Imprisonment for crimes resulting from taking or selling illicit drugs is not a solution. 

More than 2 million Americans are in prison. Black men in their early 1930s are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of whites in the same age group (Jason De Parte, The American Prison Nightmare. The New York Review, April 12,2004). Whites with only a high school education get imprisoned 20 times as often as those with college degrees. The prison and jail population increased from 380,000 in 1975 to 2.2 million in 2004. The mentally ill account for 16% of the prison population, i.e., about 350,000 on a given day. 

Of the >3,300 people in prison awaiting execution in the United States, 10% suffer from serious mental illness. In the overall prison population, 17% have serious mental illness. Many become normal when treated with psychoactive drugs. Since the closing of state-run mental health hospitals in the United States a generation ago, 330,000 of the 2.2 million persons in the nation s prisons are mentally ill. Some newly released people become violent when they receive littie help finding jobs, housing, and treatment for their mental illness. For example, in Kansas 65% of the admissions to state prisons were due to violations of parole, usually by people with drug addictions or mental illness. 

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