A major focus of my work has been calling attention to individuals with mental illnesses who are locked in our jails and prisons. Jails should not be our new mental asylums and I am outraged that more than two million persons with mental health problems are booked into U.S jails each year. I also find it frustrating that many mental health advocates marginalize this problem. I have been told by advocates that persons with mental illnesses who get arrested deserve it. Yet, as I documented in my book and as this story from the Associated Press clearly shows, many inmates with mental illnesses are NOT criminals. They are persons whose major crime is that they got sick. It was their illness that led to them violating the law, not criminal intent.
NEW YORK (AP) — Jerome Murdough was just looking for a warm place to sleep on a chilly night last month when he curled up in an enclosed stairwell on the roof of a Harlem public housing project where he was arrested for trespassing.
A week later, the mentally ill homeless man was found dead in a Rikers Island jail cell that four city officials say had overheated to at least 100 degrees, apparently because of malfunctioning equipment.