Ivano Abbadessa

Ivano Abbadessa

Are prisons becoming the new asylums?

west | Welfare Society Territory - 10.22.2013 |

Prisons are becoming the new psychiatric hospitals. Just in the US, there are tens of thousands of inmates with mental health disorders and disabilities. It’s a critical situation from a social point of view, but also from an economic one, seeing as treating the mentally ill behind bars is not a cheap solution. In fact it costs the US taxpayer about $9 billion a year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness: certainly not cheap in times of shutdown.

The patients include people with cerebral disorders ranging from depression to schizophrenia, to borderline, antisocial personality disorders, which are characterized by sudden changes in mood.

The current emergency situation in US prisons has its roots in the closure of hundreds of nursing homes during the seventies, under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, which was justified by a lack of funding. Many patients were abandoned to wander through the city’s streets: without homes, jobs or psychiatric treatment. This created the ideal conditions for them to end up in jail because their marginality, poverty and drug use made them an easy prey for crime.

This reality has got increasingly worse over the years. The prisons of Cook County (Illinois), Los Angeles and New York City have the biggest population of mentally ill prisoners. It is estimated that the 11,000 prisoners who are treated daily in these three prisons are the equivalent of 28% of the total number of places available in the 213 state psychiatric hospitals in the US. These figures are growing even as crime rates fall. For example, in the city of New York, the prison population is 11,500, compared to 13,500 in 2005. But the number of inmates with mental health problems has increased to 4,300, compared to just 3,300 eight years ago.

The situation is certainly no better in Italy. One detainee in three suffers from mental health disorders. Of the total prison population (about 70,000), 20,000 have a psychiatric illness. With the closure of judicial psychiatric hospitals in 2014, the problem will only get worse. This will exacerbate the problem of overcrowding, which is already at record levels. If appropriate measures are not taken, some inmates in these hospitals will certainly find themselves back behind bars, thus compromising any possibility of recovery. Psychiatrists themselves argue that it is better to treat these people outside the prison walls.