Mentally ill prisoners, homeless the focus of media report but not national healthcare debate

GRITS FOR BREAKFAST, Thursday, September 17, 2009

[This is a response to Josh Rushing's {Al Jazeera's English news service} report on mentally ill prisoners in U.S.jails - especially the topic's absence from the national healthcare debate. This is the brouhaha which generated Liz's hate mail mentioned this morning]

Josh Rushing from Al Jazeera's English-language news has produced a quite well done, two-part video report on the mentally ill in US prisons, focusing particularly on Texas prisons and the Harris County jail (which is the largest mental institution in Texas, according to the report). See:

• Part One
• Part Two

The two pieces run around 20 minutes all told and are well worth watching. Part one in particular contains some good interviews with staff and inmates at the Harris County Jail and hones on the relationship between homelessness and the criminalization of the mentally ill. Part two focuses more on the politics and history of how we reached this sorry state and also contains some interesting interviews with volunteers from our friends at Restorative Justice Ministries as they greeted prisoners fresh out of lockup in Huntsville.

An excellent point raised by Rushing is the near-complete lack of discussion about providing mental health services in the ongoing national healthcare debate. I'd also noticed that nobody in D.C. is talking about mental health and have wondered how the "individual mandate" for people to buy insurance will work with people who are homeless and mentally ill.

Kudos to the Harris County Sheriff for letting Rushing in the jail for interviews with inmates, medical staff, and front-line jail personnel. The state prison system refused, which I thought was bad form. Everybody knows we have a serious problem with warehousing the mentally ill in prisons and jails; there's no need to be close-lipped with the media about what's happening inside public institutions.

RELATED: From MWWatch.org, see "Loathsome Prison Conditions for the Mentally Ill,"  covering a recent Congressional hearing on the topic.

Related Grits posts:

• Mentally ill youth strain juvenile system
• Total spent on homeless 'frequent fliers' better spent outside of jail
• SA Jail Shrink: Mental health services in free world a must
• Number of mentally ill in jail a 'community barometer'
• Reduce number of mentally ill languishing in jail
• Prevention, punishment, mental illness and crime
• Outpatient centers better solution than jails for competency restoration
• Mental health courts: A strategy that works?
• Federal bill backing mental health courts a teaspoon of remedy for an oceanic problem
• Locals everywhere struggle to manage mentally ill offenders
• Using jails for mental health treatment an expensive, counterproductive approach
• Number of mentally ill inmates, parolees rising