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| Why are so many mentally ill people imprisoned in Pennsylvania? |
| By pennlive.com- Daniel Simmons-Ritchie |
| Published: 07/21/2015 |
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EDITOR'S NOTE: In 2006, with some controversy, the state shuttered central Pennsylvania's only mental hospital. The closure of the Harrisburg State Hospital came with a promise from state officials to the 12 counties it served: mentally ill people wouldn't end up on city streets. Instead, savings from the closure would be reinvested in caseworkers and other programs to help the region's mentally ill live in the community. This is the start of a multi-part package that will publish over the next couple of months looking at people with mental illnesses and the overworked and underfunded system that's now in place to serve them. There's a grim joke among correctional officers across Pennsylvania: Prisons are no longer lock-ups for America's worst offenders; they're asylums for the mentally ill. Based on an analysis of data from county and state prisons, PennLive estimates that nearly a third of Pennsylvania's 87,756 inmates had a mental illness on an average day last year. Of those inmates, PennLive estimates, about a third of them had a "serious mental illness" – defined as the most chronic and debilitating of mental disorders, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Both those rates are significantly higher than the rate among Pennsylvanians outside of prison. It begs the question: Why are so many of the state's mentally ill being locked up? Read More. |
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