Mental Health Issues In Prison Essay

Nowadays, close to 50% of the prison population have mental health problems, and it has become one of the serious social problems in the U.S. After the federal program of deinstitutionalizing psychiatric facilities began in1960’s, the government closed down most of the mental health hospitals. Ever since then, the number of prisoners keeps increasing every year. Mentally ill prisoners usually carry many problems in prison. For example, it is hard for them to follow the prison rules; therefore, they are more likely to be charged of facility rule violation. Many of mentally ill offenders and prisoners have been struggling with their mental health problems, but the U.S justice system seems not being very supportive about them. Even prison guards …show more content…
Also, prison guards have claimed that sometime mentally ill prisoners act quite dangerous. According to the article “Violence Behind Bars”, “Something is happening that’s causing inmates to act out in quite serious and dangerous ways, sand stuff do not have that situation under control”. (Grisson). Even though they want to give them treatments, if mentally ill prisoners may be threaten to prison guards or other inmates, the only thing they can do is to place them into a cell and separate from other inmates. For example, 18 years old mentally ill prisoner in Arizona jail attacked four prison guards that resulted in one hospitalized with server injure. According to the prison employee, this prisoner had never shown violence behavior before. Everything that happened was unexpected. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said, "We never know what is going to happen in jail, especially in the psychiatric ward" (The Independent Study). There are many situations that prison guards cannot even control mental health prisoners. For this kind of situation, no one knows the solution. Not only mentally ill prisoners suffer in prion, but also prisons guards suffer to deal with prisoners who have mental heal