Criminal Justice System: Chapter Summary And Analysis

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Introduction and Summary: Chapter 11 focuses on the individuals with mental illness and the criminal justice system. Every year there are hundreds of thousands of individuals with mental illness who are arrested. The past decade a lot of the state hospital and mental health facilities have been shut down for lack of funding. Many of the seriously mentally ill are roaming the streets. The serious mental illness regarding this chapter would include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression. Schizophrenia is where the individual has hallucinations, delusion, and severe disorganization. Bipolar disorder is where the individual has the ability to change their current mood to extremely high to extremely low. The bipolar illness causes …show more content…

I did not realize how much of a problem those individuals have when it comes to the criminal justice system. The information is very important to the criminal justice system. When looking into the police enforcement, prison system, the court system and even the safety of the community knowing and understanding the basic information with serious mental illness people is very important. The author provides a lot of information in this chapter. The author covers a lot of different aspects when it deals with the serious mentally ill. The author provides evidence from different studies completed throughout the years. The author’s arguments and basic assumptions are valid. With the large amount of information provided in the chapter it bakes and valid the authors assumptions and arguments. The author’s argument did not have to persuade me. It did however give me more information to believe the system and policy dealing with mental illness individuals is flawed. I do not currently have any counter arguments with this chapter. The strengths of the article provide a lot of information to support that the system is flawed. I was surprised about how the victims are to be treated. It surprised me because you always hear about how inmates used to be treated, but not a lot of information on how the inmates with mental illness were treated. There are a lot of implications for this policy. First off there needs to be more resources available for those with serious mental illness. Resources would include programs to help those with serious mental illness be able to have access to their medications. Second, there needs to be more mental health facility that house those with mental illness who have committed crimes. Even though some prisons have certain areas for those with serious mental illness, there needs to be just a facility that