Additionally, the nationmust acknowledge and address the forces that contribute to the disproportionately high involvement of persons from ethnic and racial minority communities in the criminal justice system.
In 2011, the United States Supreme Court decided Brown Plata, and ordering California to release over 40000 prisoners because the medical services including mental health care that the State provided did not reach care minimum level required under the Eighth Amendment. Of course the Court highlighted in its opinion that prisoners in California with serious mental illness did not receive minimal, adequate care. On top of that, while standing in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic, as long as of a shortage of treatment beds, suicidal inmates should be held for prolonged periods in ‘telephone booth’ sized cages without toilets A psychiatric expert reported observing an inmate who had been held in such a cage for nearly 24 hours. Prison officials explained they had ‘no place to put him. This decision is significant because it makes clear that if prison officials do not provide adequate mental health services to inmates, they risk facing similarly serious sanctions.
In the past decade, America is locking up increasing numbers of individuals with mental health conditions.
MHA is both concerned by and opposed to criminal increasing use sanctions and incarceration, replacing the state mental hospitals with far more drastic curtailment of personal liberty and preclusion of community integration and communitybased treatment. Prisoners with mental health conditions are especially vulnerable to the difficult and sometimes deplorable conditions that prevail in jails, prisons, and identical correctional facilities. Overcrowding often contributes to inadequacy of mental health services and to ineffective classification and separation of prisoner classes. It can both increase vulnerability and exacerbate mental illnesses. For these and other reasons, MHA supports maximum reasonable diversion.
MHA and its affiliates should work to inform members of law enforcement and correctional groups, judges and attorneys, mental health professionals and advocates, prisoners and their families, the community and the media about persons excessive number with mental illnesses and addictive disorders in prisons and jails and the inherent difficulties involved in providing decent and humane care to such persons in these settings and should develop and advocate for effective strategies addressing these problems.
MHA and its affiliates should work with prison reform groups to highlight the treatment and conditions of person with mental health conditions in prisons and jails and to ensure that everyone with a mental health condition receives decent and humane mental health services while incarcerated.
Placing prisoners with mental health conditions in institutions, especially correctional facilities, imposes special obligations on society.
Jails, prisons and other correctional facilities have a duty to provide medical services, including mental health services, and to provide protection from harm. These services are basic human rights of every prisoner with a mental illness or an addictive disorder. Correctional facilities must exercise special vigilance in dealing with every prisoner with a mental illness or addictive disorder because his or her ability to assert these human rights might be impaired. Therefore, mHA believes that correctional facilities should provide more than the minimum services that will be compelled as a matter of American constitutional law.