Examples Of Criminal Injustice

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Criminal Injustice and the Mentally Ill Offender

The United States is the world leader in the number of individuals incarcerated; the proportion of its population behind bars is the highest of any other industrialized country. With these high rates of incarceration come significant financial and social costs. The burgeoning rise in prison and jail populations consist of specific groups of offenders: juveniles, elderly, learning disabled, terminally ill and by far the largest group comes from mentally ill individuals. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half of all prison and jail inmates have a mental health problem (James & Glaze, 2006).
While treatment for mentally ill offenders should not be the primary responsibility …show more content…
The” War on Drugs” campaign, which started in 1988 with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, has significantly increased the volume of drug arrests, and convictions. Offenders convicted of drug possession and sales has increased exponentially; these individuals also have high rates of drug use, are incarcerated with greater occurrence and reoccurrence, and received longer prison sentences than before the 80’s. This campaign led to the fast rise of subpopulations in the nation’s prison and probation populations. A sizable proportion of these individuals has co-occurring psychiatric disorders, thus amplifying the number of SMI offenders in the criminal justice system. A research team, Swartz et al., (1998), examined the combined effects of substance abuse along with noncompliance of prescribed medications increases the risk of serious violence among persons with severe mental illness. They concluded that mentally ill offenders who use illegal drugs are more prone to violence likely to be and have a higher rate of arrest and incarceration than mentally ill offenders who were compliant and did not abuse substances. Due to the failure of community mental health systems to respond adequately to the needs of formerly institutionalized people, populations incarcerated increased considerably; this pushed policy-makers into the belief that rehabilitation programs were ineffectual and not cost-effective. Additionally, policy changes towards stricter sentencing resulted in a loss of judiciary discretion in imposing sanctions and sentencing; judges were unable to exact sentences based on individualized circumstances and considerations, including the need for psychiatric or substance abuse treatment (Weinstein and
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