Mentally ill Americans are behind bars because, too often, they have nowhere else to go. More than half a century later, prisons have in large measure become our mental asylums: The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that some 365,000 American adults with serious mental illness are behind bars and an additional 770,000 are on probation or parole. The one I worked in was a monstrosity with more than 5,000 inmates, passive, resigned, and in despair. Back in the 1960s, these hospitals were places of hopelessness, where inmates were commonly locked up in smelly wards and given no effective treatment. To gain a historical perspective, let me also draw on my experiences as a clinical psychologist with state mental hospitals. America has made mental illness a crime: Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital as many as half of all inmates in America’s jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. The author, Alisa Roth, states: “There’s an epidemic of police shootings of people with mental illness.” The book is an exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons. To understand why we have come to such an abnormal situation, I recommend reading Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness published in 2018 by Basic Books, New York, NY. One major reason is that very often police officers, rather than mental health professionals, are the first to respond to mentally ill individuals displaying socially disruptive or violent behavior. Most recently, Pete Earley wrote for the Washington Post: “Americans with mental illnesses make up nearly a quarter of those killed by police officers.” He has highlighted mental illness as a specific issue that many experts believe is crucial to reducing police-related violence. AMERICA’S MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS: TREATING THE MENTALLY ILL AS CRIMINALS

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