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Mental Health Madness By Pete Earley: Book Review

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Thought the course of the semester we have discussed many interesting topics. We also had the opportunity to pick a book to read. I chose the book “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness” written by Pete Earley. Pete Early wrote about his experience with his bipolar ill son Mike and the criminal justice system. In this paper, I will analyze the mentally ill and the police and the mentally ill and prisons. I will also explore how the book could be used as supplemental material in this course. Most mentally ill individuals are non-violent and are most likely to be victims. Very rarely, you will see mentally ill individuals committing a crime. When they do commit a crime or have some sort of mental crisis, the first ones …show more content…

Most law enforcement agencies do not provide special training for officers on how to deal with mental health crisis. If they get any training, this is usually provided by police academy in a four-hour core training class. Police officers who have little training often believe that this population is violent. Therefore, people with mental illnesses are 50 to 67% more likely than those without the illnesses to be arrested (Slate, Buffington-Vollum & Johnson, 2013, p.188). The Earley book talks about one of Mike’s incidents when he breaks into a nearby house and decides to take a bath. The police officers were on edge during this situation. Before making this arrest for the burglary, two sheriff deputies had been shot by someone who was mentally ill. There were five officers that wrestled Mike into handcuffs (Earley, 2006, p.21). If police officers are not exposed to mental health training, this usually contributes to the criminalization of the mentally ill, because the officers don’t understand their …show more content…

Because many police officers find that the mental health system is not helpful, they often simply arrest the mentally ill individual and send that person to jail or prison. In prison, the life of that mentally ill individual does not get any better. Like regular police officers, correctional officers do not get any training on how to deal with mental ill individuals. In some prisons, they do not have a professional psychiatrist to help the mentally ill inmates. Meanwhile the prison guards do not have enough training. Mentally ill prisoners are not getting the help they need. Most of the time inmates are being diagnosed and given the wrong medicine. The criminal justice system needs to do something about

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