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Locking Down the Mentally Ill

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

GUGGENHEIM SPECIAL REPORT Locking Down the Mentally Ill By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 10:06 pm Solitary Confinement Cells Have Become America?s New Asylums ?If you want to know where they are all being kept,? said Todd Winstrom, ?they?re down in the hole.? Winstrom, a staff attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, was talking about what happens to mentally ill offenders when they enter his state?s prison system. Without treatment options?and without anyplace else to put them?these prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement, where they may remain for months or years. Since solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe psychological trauma in prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions, it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging place to incarcerate the mentally ill...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on February 24, 2010 (boomark / email).