Police Mentally Ill Policing and Mentally Ill Term Paper

Police Mentally Ill

Policing and Mentally Ill Individuals

There is a significantly higher proportion of mentally ill individuals in the criminal justice system than compared to the same proportion of the United States in the society in general. It is estimated that a mentally ill individual is about eight times more likely to enter into the criminal justice system than they are a mental hospital. These individuals, as the video and the interview illustrates, have special challenges that make them difficult to deal with. Often they hear voices and are paranoid schizophrenics that require a host of special medications to allow them the possibility of being stable. However, many of these individuals face specific challenges that make it difficult for them to access and maintain an effective treatment regimen. This paper will provide a brief overview of how this situation arose and what implications it has for modern police forces.

It is important to put this problem in its historical context to fully understand how the situation arose. During the 1950s and the 1960s the United States began to change the way it thinks about the mentally ill. Legislators began to close state run mental hospitals that provided care for patients that were in need of mental health services. These individuals were left to attempt to access services from the different communities in which the lived rather than the state facilities. As a result, many of these patients no longer were able to receive the care that they needed. In 1955 there were 558,239 public (state and county) psychiatric beds available for mentally ill individuals and the population of the United States was 164.3 million which resulted in the availability of public psychiatric beds was thus 340 beds per 100,000 population; however, in 2005 there were 52,539 public (state and county) psychiatric beds available for mentally ill individuals and at this time the population of the United States was 269.4 million resulting in the availability of public psychiatric beds was thus 17 beds per 100,000 population (Torrey, Geller, Stanley, & Jaffe, N.d.).

By closing these facilities, many mentally ill patients lost their access to mental health care and no longer received treatment of any kind for a variety of reasons; mainly that there was excess demand for services that could not be met by the community facilities. Since many of these individuals could no care for their basic needs, many of these people ended up homeless or in prison. Some of the cases of people with mental illnesses would ultimately lead to violence if their conditions were untreated. In the documentary some of the ex-prisoners would hear voices…