Prisons are ill-equipped to treat inmates with mental disorders because serious mental illness has become so prevalent that there are not enough staff in prison to do so.
Serious mental illness has become so prevalent in the US corrections system that jails and prisons are now commonly called “the new asylums.” In point of fact, the Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail, or New York’s Riker’s Island Jail each hold more mentally ill inmates than any remaining psychiatric hospital in the United States. Overall, approximately 20% of inmates in jails and 15% of inmates in state prisons are now estimated to have a serious mental illness. Based on the total inmate population, this means approximately 383,000 individuals with severe psychiatric disease were behind bars in the United States in 2014 or nearly 10 times the number of patients remaining in the nation’s state hospitals.
With this information, we can conclude that Serious mental illness has become so prevalent in the US corrections system that jails and prisons are now commonly called “the new asylums.”
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