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Mental Health In Prison Essay

747 Words3 Pages

Charlie Schulman

Lochner

English 10
1/10/23
Title Everyone faces different types of mental health issues, but our jail inmates frequently link poor mental health with incarceration. According to Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson, “Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population” (Stevenson 188). A tragic and difficult statistic. Poor mental health has an impact on daily behavior and can cause mood swings, and the inability to behave, think, and communicate rationally, which frequently results in poor decision-making. In our contemporary justice system, it is one of the most prevalent injustices that prisoners …show more content…

Heather Stringer describes the ongoing challenges facing the criminal justice system and how psychologists are attempting to alter the way inmates are treated in her article, Improving mental health for inmates. She discovered that Robert Morgan, Ph.D., holds the opinion that "combining mental health care and treatment for criminality is critical because inmates can learn not only how to cope with mental illness, but also practical life skills like how to challenge antisocial thought patterns and to develop healthy connections with others" (Stringer, March 2019). Prisoners require more than just mental health care; they also require instruction on how to blend in with and get along in society. Without these vital abilities, individuals will continue to struggle and probably continue the actions that got them into trouble in the first place, creating a vicious cycle. The goal is to keep former offenders out of jail. She also makes a crucial point about the treatment of convicts behind bars. Discipline is crucial, but frequently it is brutal and just serves to hasten the …show more content…

Too frequently, incarceration takes place as a result of root-cause neglect. According to Elisa Jácome, "Previous research suggests that enhancing access to behavioral health services can be an effective method to reduce criminal activity" (Jácome, July 2021) in the article How better access to mental health care can reduce crime. If those with mental illnesses had better access to and availability of resources, they might have been able to escape the treacherous path that lay ahead. It has been discovered through social study and observation that "people with greater mental health are more likely to recognize — and be deterred by — the repercussions of illegal action" (Jácome, July 2021). This suggests that we are more likely to be successful in lowering criminal activity if we recognize the source of the issue and better equip convicts. We may begin to see an effective strategy to support a general decrease in the damaging pattern that circulates within the system when mental and behavioral health resources are correctly allocated and issues are addressed at the

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