The Indiana Department of Correction is honored to host “Unlock the Mystery” will address solutions for managing the explosive growth of the mentally ill, substance abusing, and sex offender populations within the adult male, adult female and juvenile populations in jails and prisons. For further National Mental Health Conference information, please email unlockthemystery@idoc.in.gov or |
From The Poughkeepsie Journal
Newsday
As state lawmakers get deeper into a new legislative session, they have put the finishing touches on an agreement to provide more humane treatment for mentally ill prison inmates. This was the right thing to do, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer has wisely signed on.
Lawmakers adjourned last year without voting on a proposal to prohibit solitary confinement for mentally ill state prison inmates in many cases.
About 12 percent of the state prison population is afflicted with a serious mental illness, a situation prison officials cannot control. The state’s prisons, by default, have taken the place of psychiatric centers as the mental health system has been deinstitutionalized over several decades.
The bill’s sponsors and mental-health advocates rightly called for modernizing the prison system’s treatment of such inmates. The measure provides for several hours of therapeutic programming each day for inmates with serious psychiatric illnesses and provides separate residential treatment units. Supporters made the compelling case prisons would be safer because mentally ill inmates would get needed treatment and officers would be trained on how to handle that population.
Originally, the proposed agreement also called for outlawing the “box” or solitary confinement for these prisoners, on the premise such treatment only worsened mental illness. That was modified to limit a mentally ill inmate’s time in the box under certain circumstances, or provide clinical assessment during solitary confinement.
The Assembly, Senate and Spitzer developed compromise legislation last summer, but the Assembly never got around to approving it. The state has faced lawsuits over its treatment of mentally ill inmates and, particularly as a result of one case last year, is being forced to make some improvements.
This legislative action takes reform a step further, helping the prison system deal with the fallout of deinstitutionalization while providing more humane treatment for the considerable number of inmates needing psychiatric care. Many of the measures won’t take effect until two years after the first mental-health unit is constructed, or July 2011 at the latest.
The state took way too long to fix this problem and must ensure nothing else gets in the way.