Prison population

Three thousand people were in Camp I. Then the second camp swelled the prison population to 14,000 — Dr. ter Meer was never to share his lunch with them. During the first two years of construction, reports came to his office of daily trainloads of "workers" coming to Auschwitz. Then Camp III and Camp IV were built, both nearer the buna factory than the other two camps. Then at last, in 1943, Ter Meer made a third visit to Auschwitz. Returning to Frankfurt, he had himself transferred to Italy, where he became plenipotentiary for the Italian chemical industries. Ambros appeals followed him "More workers are needed." "Herr Doctor Ambros is asking for assistance at Auschwitz."... 

Fortunately, new treatments have greatly improved the plight of the patient with schizophrenia. Thanks in large part to the introduction of newer antipsychotic medications, few patients with this disease spend their lives in long-term psychiatric hospitals anymore. However, we have a long way to go. Individuals with schizophrenia are currently a sizeable proportion of both the homeless population and the prison population in the United States. Even with the great advances in schizophrenia treatment in the last 50 years, this illness still takes a tremendous toll on the lives of its sufferers and their families. 

For discussions concerning informed consent and medical experimentation on prison populations, see Mark, Vernon H, Neville, Robert, (1977) Brain Surgery in Aggressive Epileptics Social and Ethical Implications. Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, (eds, Robert Hunt John Arras). Veatch, Robert M, (1977). Case Studies In Medical Ethics, pp, 267-71 Bernier, Barbara L, (1994) Class, Race, And Poverty Medical Technologies And Socio-Political Choices. 11 Harv. BlackLetter J. 115,... 

One reason for this explosion in the prison population was the growing popularity of mandatory sentencing laws. However, critics argued that it was not only unjust but uneconomical to lock someone up for five years for growing marijuana plants, for example. 

Medicolegal problems, especially with the use of triazolam, have been discussed (SEDA-13, 33) debate continues on the interpretation of evidence that points to an increased incidence of adverse behavioral effects with triazolam (39), flunitrazepam, and other short-acting high-potency agents (12). A review has highlighted a substantial rate (0.3-0.7%) of aggressive reactions to benzodiazepines, and the fact that a majority so affected may have intended a disinhibitory effect, with clear forensic implications (40). High rates of benzodiazepine consumption, much of it illicit, continue in prison populations. 

Here the research statistics got fuzzy and perhaps a little creative to demonstrate the hypothesis that psilocybin therapy was effective in reducing the crime rate. In their paper published in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice (Leary et al. 1965), the researchers broke the numbers down into types of return due to parole violations and due to new crimes. They found that, compared to a 50/50 incidence in the prison population as a whole, only 7% of project participants were returned for new crimes, with 52% returned for parole violations. One and one half years after termination of the program the rate of new crimes has been reduced from 28% to 7%, although if parole violations are counted the overall return rate has not changed. It is proposed that these results warrant further research into the potentials of the methods used, especially since no other method of reducing the crime rate exists. (Leary et al. 1965 Doblin 1998). 

A large proportion of the prison population are drug users and treatment is increasingly provided to avoid relapse into illegal drug use and crime. 

Routine data on drug use in prison are rarely collected, and most information comes from local ad hoc studies. While a high proportion — up to 90 % in some cases — of remand and sentenced prisoners are drug users, numbers of problem drug users are lower, ranging from 20 to 50 % of the total prison population in most Member States. 

The easiest thing we can do is put people in jail, but you caimot prison-build your way into reducing crime (Hynes, 2006). The US. prison population began to level off recently, but over two million adults are still in correctional institutions, an all-time high. There was a 4% rise in the number of persons in prison in the United States between 2000 and 2007, less than the 77% increase from 1990 to 2000. In New York, there are 12 mental health courts, which prescribe treatment of criminals rather than sending them to prison. There are 120 such courts throughout the country. 

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. 

I was appointed the camp s sanitation officer, an assignment that allowed me to move freely around the camp to check the sorry state of the latrines and also to visit with the diverse prisoner population. I encountered some Japanese-American veterans of the celebrated iooth/442d Regimental Combat Team and learned from them of the battlefield deaths of two old friends from St. Mary s in Los Angeles. 

The incarceration rate in the United States is the highest in the world among industrialized countries. The explosion in the prison population in the past thirty years is not due to an increase in the number of crimes committed but rather to changes in laws and crime-control policies. 

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