And they kept talking to him because they knew him. He was strapped into a restraint chair for transport from the court to the jail, and I went with the officers to retrieve him and bring him back to a cell. One day when I was there, there was a man who acted up in court and was sent back to the jail. We talk about the civilian mental health care system and the criminal justice system as two separate entities really, in a lot of cases, the patients in both of them are going back and forth between the two. The officers, too, are legitimately concerned about having things thrown at them or being attacked.Īnother thing that struck me there was this sense of people cycling through. It's easy to portray these people as monsters or otherworldly, and I think we need to remember they're real people who are just not getting the treatment they need. On what Roth learned about mental health care in the criminal justice system County's jail, allowed her inside - to see firsthand what happens there. Some correctional institutions refused Roth's requests when she was researching her book to see their facilities.

'And they opened the little door in the cell where you hand food trays through, and there was this almost overpowering smell of feces,' Roth says, 'because this man had smeared the walls of his cell.'īy some counts, Roth says, as many as half of all inmates suffer from some sort of psychiatric disorder jails in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are now the three largest institutions providing psychiatric care in the U.S. One time when I was, corrections officers came out with a man who had been strapped into a wheelchair and was bleeding from his arm because he had scratched out a piece of his own flesh.'Īnother day she accompanied officers as they tried to get inmates to come out for recreation time or for a shower. 'You see people who are desperately sick. 'It's unpleasant, it's loud, it's claustrophobic,' she tells NPR's All Things Considered. In her new book Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, Roth investigates the widespread incarceration of the mentally ill in the U.S., and what she sees as impossible burdens placed on correctional officers to act as mental health providers when they're not adequately trained.

In jails and prisons across the United States, mental illness is prevalent and psychiatric disorders often worsen because inmates don't get the treatment they need, says journalist Alisa Roth.

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