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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 6 page paper looks at mental illness and how it is treated in the prison population. Why mental illness is prevalent in the system is also examined. Examples of mentally ill prisoners are provided. Bibliography lists 6 sources.
Page Count:
6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: RT13_SA236crm.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
children by killing them. Clearly, she is mentally ill. She had a trial and was sentenced to life in prison and while many thought she should have been given the
death penalty as she brought some children to the tub kicking and screaming and fighting for their lives, others felt sorry for her. Why would a mother do such a
thing? Clearly, she--and people like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson--are mentally ill. In fact, in the Yates case, her husband claimed that the mental health system is at fault for
not recognizing her illness in the first place. Indeed, Yates and other mass murderers are not the only mentally ill people to lurk in the U.S. prisons. There are many
people who are in prison in part due to mental illness. In other cases, the penal system exacerbates symptoms of mental illness. More and more, people with mental illness
are being held in prisons in the United States, at least according to the U.S. Department of Justice (Chelala, 1999). One 1998 study demonstrated that a total of 283,800
(1999, p.210) prison inmates possess some form mental illness, something that is equivalent to about 16% (1999, p.210) of the entire prison population. The figure had been in line with
a previous literature review which suggested that about 6 to 15% (1999, p.210) of people in city and county jails, in addition to 10-15% (1999, p.210) of inmates in state
prisons, have severe mental illness. The report also noted that one of the primary reasons for the increasing numbers of people in this category has to do with the
fact that all U.S. prisons would take on people who emanated from the wave of discharges from long stay hospitals that began during the 1960s (1999). This is an important
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