By GABRIELLE MARTIN, Staff Reporter.
What would you do if you were experiencing severe physical pain and the only way you could see a doctor or receive treatment for it was to commit a crime? It doesn’t have to be murdering someone… maybe just stealing a candy bar or breaking a window. Would you do it? What if this physical pain caused you to no longer have complete control of your actions?
According to a 2006 study by the Department of Justice, 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners and 64% of local prisoners are mentally ill; yet the National Institute of Mental Health states that only 26.2% of the general population is mentally ill. Studies also show that mentally-ill inmates have a much higher rate of recidivism, or relapse into criminal behavior, than non-mentally ill inmates. Why? Because that’s one of the few places where they can receive treatment. Why should you care?
You should care because your tax dollars that are going to support prisons would be used much more efficiently if they went to support community-based mental health institutions. There are two main reasons why you should want to support community-based mental health institutions: they are cost effective and they would lower the crime rate.
Let’s go over how they are cost effective. A presentation by the Health Management Associates in 2011 revealed that, in Texas, the cost of housing a mentally ill person in prison was about $137 per day with an average stay of 80 days. This brings the average cost to $10,960. Now, you may want to sit down for this next part. The cost of treating a person in a community-based mental health institution in Texas costs only $12 per person per day.
Personally, I would rather have a cost of $12 per day than $137.
However, that cost is only worth spending if it does any amount of good, right? I believe that if we had more community-based mental health care facilities our crime rate would drastically fall. We would be able to treat people who are mentally ill BEFORE they commit a crime or at least help prevent them from becoming re-incarcerated after a first offense.
While it is true that many mentally ill inmates have access to mental health treatment, treatment in prison is often not effective in the long-term. Once a mentally-ill person gets out of prison and a prescription or therapy runs out, they’re right back where they started. They commit a crime, either because they want to feel better again or because their mental illness causes them to not have complete control of their psychological functions. After a school shooting or a gun-related crime, don’t we often hear that the assailant was mentally ill?
If — as a society — we could start taking mental illness just as seriously as physical illness, and if we had places such as community-based mental health institutions for people to get treatment, crime rates would go down because people would have the treatment that they need BEFORE a crime is committed.
