JAILS: Obama's Asylum and Garbage Dump

Fewer than 40,000 Americans currently reside in psychiatric hospitals, while according to the Department of Justice thirty times that number, 1.25 million mentally ill people, are serving time in US prisons. (1)

An estimated 80 % of homeless person are mentally ill.(2) Because homelessness has become a transcendent part of the American panorama, it is obvious to see that because of this reality, many homeless people eventually have confrontations with the law. This explains the high numbers of mentally ill people in prisons.

The nationwide deinstitutionalization of patients with mental illness, which led to the loss of 90 percent of state psychiatric beds over the last 50 years, was supposed to be replaced with a system of 2,000 community mental health centers. But most states viewed the closure of psychiatric hospitals as a chance to save money, which resulted in the creation of fewer than 700 "underfunded" community-based mental health facilities. (3)

Houston in Texas has one of the nation’s largest homeless populations. (4 )Their prisons are the ground zero for homeless and mental health programmes that seek to assist these individuals. Unfortunately, funds are low and mental health workers willing to work with this sort of population are scarce.

It has been documented by experts in the field of mental health that there are fewer mental health patients in hospitals now than prisons.

In Harris County, where Houston is located, 130,000 people are processed in their facility each year. At least 2,500 are currently on psychotropic drugs.

The story of one inmate, who is an illiterate homeless man, has been incarcerated 31 times in his life.He has schizophrenia. While in the prison, he was aggressive, so aggressive that he had to be brought over directly from processing, had been on office meds, was combative, threatening, hostile, throwing feces. After a short week on meds, he was a completely different person. He doesn't remember assaulting a family member, which is what he is currently being charged with. If found guilty, he will spend most of his life in the Texas prison system.

The Texas prison system has more than 150,000 inmates and 112 units across the state. Fault Lines visited one facility, the Luther Unit, where two psychiatric staff are responsible for more than 1,300 inmates. (5)

Convicts regularly report to a doctor via web-cam every six months. The medications flow like honey, but the contact with medical staff is clearly brief and limited.

Obama's health care plan doesn't address mental health care for the homeless, destitute, and imprisoned. Why not? Why should he care? An ounce of prevention is so much cheaper than a grain of cure. But he would rather waste time discussing how to help people who fund his agendas.his lobby interests, and those who have political gain in the process.

As if the stigma of being a mentally ill person wasn't troubling enough, these convicts now facing the future's uncertainty as being branded as a felon.

Locking up drug addicted or alcoholic so they can't feed their addiction doesn't always make sense. They need rehabilitation services to go with it.The efficacy of jail-based treatment was reported by a 2006 Maryland study that found that 69 percent of heroin-addicted inmates who received counseling and drug therapy in the months before their release continued treatment one month after leaving prison, and only 29 percent tested positive for heroin. (6)

Copyright Asher Kade 2009