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Pete Earley

578 Words3 Pages

Pete Earley brings a mixture of historical context, personal story, and investigative journalism together to create a powerful narrative. Earley's writing is earnest and intelligent and remains unbiased when writing about the mental health system. “Crazy” is a two-part creation. You have the personal narrative of the author’s experience with his son who suffers a mental breakdown interwoven with his reporting from a year observing how mentally ill prisoners are treated at the Miami-Dade County Jail. Earley followed a select number of cases through the courts tracing their progress in and out of custody, interviewing judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, patient advocates and those who suffer from mental illness, and the families and friends affected. Earley puts a face and a personal twist on the experience and trauma that is mental illness. Earley documents how one of the Country’s largest prison has only one goal for their mentally ill prisoners: that they don’t kill themselves. The Miami-Dade County Jail has no specialized facilities for the mentally …show more content…

One program Earley is Crisis Intervention Training. Earley is granted access to ride-a-long with Crisis Intervention Team trained officers, working to nonviolently resolve conflict in the community. Crisis Intervention Team training started in Memphis, Tennessee when an officer shot and killed an individual with a diagnosed mental health disorder. The incident spurred the Memphis Police Department to collaborate with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to improve training procedures for officers. Earley writes of the effect the Miami-Dade County Crisis Intervention trained officers had on the mentally ill and community as a whole, increasing officer, and community

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One woman is described as, “clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment... unwashed [body] invested with fragments of unclean garments... irritation of body produced by utter filth an exposure incited her to t he horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches,”(Dix 5). Dix also describes how cages were a commonplace within almshouses by stating, “Hardly a town but can refer to some not distant period of using [cages],”(Dix 4). In this manner, Dix is imploring the Massachusetts Legislature to take immediate action. By describing these wretched conditions, Dix gives evidence and reason for reformation. The indecent livelihood of the mentally ill brought to the surface by Dix brings to question the effectiveness of the current prison system in Massachusetts.

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According to American Friends Service Committee, “numerous studies have documented the harmful psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement, which can produce debilitating symptoms and result in an increased risk of suicide and the effects are magnified for two particularly vulnerable populations: juveniles, whose brains are still developing, and people with mental health issues...” (2017). My topic of discussion deals with the injustice of social isolation in our prison system and the effects on an individual 's mental health. Kalief Browder a fairly normal adolescent residing Bronx, NY. Kalief endured false imprisonment at the age of sixteen; he spent three years and 800 days of those years were served in solitary confinement.

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605 Words | 3 Pages

Andre Lee Thomas came from a very modest upbringing with 5 brothers and absent parents. He started displaying signs of mental instability at a young age which progressively worsened as he aged making several suicide attempts. Thomas received multiple detention warrants, many times after hurting himself or in one case, stabbing his own brother. In each of these instances the warrants were not enforced (“Trouble in Mind”). A day after his last detention warrant, Thomas stabs and then removes the hearts of his ex-wife, his son, and his ex-wife’s baby from a new boyfriend.

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602 Words | 3 Pages

Many psychiatric hospitals have closed down, which the only option left for the mentally ill was to be taken in jails and prisons. In the documentary we learn

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846 Words | 4 Pages

Avery Jenkins is a mentally disabled African American man that was severely damaged and abused by the foster system since he was two years old. The mental impairment that has sprouted due to this abuse manifested into him taking the life of a man during a psychotic episode. While Bryan Stevenson presents his case in court he accentuates the absence of empathy in the prosecution of Avery Jenkins. He compares it to “‘[Asking] someone who had just lost his legs, you must climb these stairs with no assistance, and if you don't, you’re just lazy’”(Stevenson 173). With this analogy, Bryan highlights how the lack of understanding and consideration for Avery Jenkin's circumstances lead to him being punished to inhumane lengths, and if there was only some attempt to understand or empathize with his past, they would have decided on a punishment that fits the crime.

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581 Words | 3 Pages

However, the sad reality is that in most cases is too late and an individual will not get treatment for a mental health diagnosis while in prison. In this case I feel that Leon is a victim of environmental, his mother’s mental health issues, social support, and finical poverty that caused him to become who he is today. Early interventions could by educators, and mental health professionals could have helped Leon at an eelier stage in his life.

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2122 Words | 9 Pages

A recent study followed a prisoner who had been on death row for nine years. From the time of conviction to nine years later, the prisoner showed increasing signs of mental illness including severe depression and psychosis. Jailers observed that the subject began hallucinating, slurring his speech, rambling, and having outbursts. Doctors believed this prisoner to be suffering from symptoms caused by Death Row Phenomenon (Harrison,

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738 Words | 3 Pages

James, who had “no befits or insurance or any idea where he might find a doctor” (51). Gary Busch, who was tragically shot after appearing “to be experiencing a psychiatric crisis” (52). This helps to put a name and a person to the “over one million people suffer(ing) from mental illness” (53) in New York City. This number was staggering to me, as well as the fact that “close to 8,000 mentally ill people” are in NY prisons or jails. It was sad to read as well “that, nationwide, state spending on treatment for the seriously mentally ill is one-third less than it was in the 1950s” (55).

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1715 Words | 7 Pages

I then began looking at newspaper articles. I discovered a few inmates’ everyday life in prison on death row. In all cases, death row was beyond miserable. Prisoners spend over twenty-three hours in a cell each day, suffering from mental illnesses, and coping with the moral fact that they are soon to die. After reading those articles, Walter McMillian’s case made me think about how some people on death row can be innocent and still suffer the consequences for someone else’s convictive actions.

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1349 Words | 6 Pages

The shift is attributed to the unexpected clinical needs of this new outpatient population, the inability of community mental health centers to meet these needs, and the changes in mental health laws (Pollack & Feldman, 2003). Thousands of mentally ill people flowing in and out of the nation 's jails and prisons. In many cases, it has placed the mentally ill right back where they started locked up in facilities, but these jail and prison facilities are ill-equipped to properly treat and help them. In 2006 the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that there were; 705,600 mentally ill inmates in state prisons, 78,000 in federal prisons, and

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1077 Words | 5 Pages

Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended.” This story is important because it gives the readers a real-life example of the effects of long periods of confinement. Additionally, it shows us how inhumane the justice system is because they extended his time in solitary confinement due to the effects of his mental illness. Instead of adding to his time, they should have removed him from confinement and provided the necessary resources for mental recovery. To conclude, many sources and real-life examples show us how an inmate’s health can be

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834 Words | 4 Pages

In the book Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, one of the biggest focal points is mental illness. Mental illness can be tough to talk about, simply because the phrase “mental illness” encompasses such a wide range of conditions and conjures up images of deranged people, but it is very important, especially in this book. There is a certain stigma that people who are put into mental hospitals because they have medical problems or are insane and a possible danger to society. While this is sometimes true, it is far more common for patients to need help for a disorder, but just don’t know where to go or what to do, and can end up putting themselves or someone else in danger.

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1852 Words | 8 Pages

Throughout human history, humans have been known to execute gruesome acts. Whether these acts are small and insignificant or massive and change history, humans are capable of performing horrific plots against one another. To make matters worse, most of the people who commit these terrible crimes are people who are entirely in a clear state of mind. Nevertheless, there are some cases in which the line between sanity and mental instability blurs. For example, there is an ongoing debate regarding the mental health of the main character in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily.”

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1085 Words | 5 Pages

Internal pain, external pain, suicidal thoughts, drugs, and societal pressures, Craig Gilner experiences it all. Craig is a 15 year old boy from Brooklyn, New York, who lives with his family. One night when he plans to kill himself, he calls the suicide hotline, and they tell him to go to the nearest hospital and he does. Behind the doors, a huge world of experience and recovery awaits him. In the “short-term facility for adult psychiatric”(Vizzini 185), Craig meets new patients and works with others to heal himself.

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462 Words | 2 Pages

Suicides and the Criminal Justice System The reason why there is an elevated rate of suicides in the criminal justice system, particularly in jails and prisons is probably because the incarcerated population is dealing with some major stressors. Among the stressors documented or recognized, it has been observed that these people usually deal with: a “loss of liberty”, a high degree of “enforced structure and discipline”, “overcrowding” and a “dirty, depressed and aggressive environment”; in addition to “poor diet”, “feeling of guilt and shame”. What make the situation worse, are a power differential between incarcerated individuals and institutional staffs, and an uncertain future.

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