A person suffering an heart attack, a stroke or involved in serious car accident is taken to the Emergency Room of a Hospital and treated. Even a person injured in committing a crime is given emergency room care and hospital treatment before they are sent to jail. However, there is one group of ill persons, people suffering from brain health crisis, we call mental health illnesses, that do not receive emergency care and hospitalization. Law enforcement can take such a person to a county mental health crisis or to the county jail. Often the person in crisis is trespassing or acting disorderly, minor offenses, and thus arrested by the law enforcement and taken to the county jail. If a person is deemed a “danger to self or others” the person is placed in solidarity confinement, the worst treatment you can give a person suffering a mental health crisis.
Although persons with mental illness are less likely to commit a crime than the average person “an estimated 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners, and 64 percent of jail inmates have a mental health problem.” Probably more disturbing is the statistic that in the United States the “risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for those with mental illnesses.
The report with this startling statistic “cites psychiatric deinstitutionalization, the process of emptying and closing psychiatric hospitals in favor of pharmaceutical and other less extreme treatment strategies, as a major driver of these disproportionate police contacts.” Yet this, “psychiatric deinstitutionalization” in exactly what Milwaukee County and other counties in Wisconsin and nation-wide are doing with persons suffering a mental health crisis.
A person suffering a health crisis, even if the person is injured in the act of committing a serious crime, receives treatment in ER of a hospital and may be kept in the hospital. The hospitals by law, with one exception, are required to give the person,conscious or not treatment. The one exception is that persons in a health crisis suffering certain types of brain illnesses can be sent to jail! Sending our sick to jail needs to stop.
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