Week 11 Post 1 Not a Crime to Be Poor By Peter Edelman

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Section 4 : The Criminalization of Mental Illness

  • Darren Rainey - poor, African-American, 50 yrs old, Schizophrenic and serving time for a drug conviction, was punished for refusing to clean up the floor of his cell and was put in a scalding shower for almost 2 hours as he screamed in pain, he was scalded to death (Miami Herald June 2014)  not much was done until March 2017 when a 101 page report was released by the prosecutors concluding that the corrections officers had committed no crime 
  • People in poverty twice as likely to suffer from serious mental illness than the average person 
  • The cycle continues- Previously incarcerated people with major psychiatric disorders are 2.4 times more likely to be reincarcerated than people without such disorders 
  • Number of beds available in state mental hospitals has dropped from an average of 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015 (Dean Aufderheide, Health Affairs Blog, 2014)
  • Ten times as many people with a mental illness in our prisons/jails than in state mental institutions 
  • Corizon- largest for-profit medical and mental health provider in country for prisons, jails and detention centers, is the result of a 2011 merger between health prison services and correctional medical services, their revenue is somewhere around $1.5 Billion, NY Times did a year long investigation into prison health in 2005 and found stories of horrible deaths as a result of horrible health and mental health care by Prison Health Services 
  • Nunez v. New York- 2012 Chasan and Legal Aid Society along with 2 other private law firms sued to stop the violence against adolescent inmates, federal gov was also doing their own investigation, the US filed their own lawsuit and joined Nunez case in late 2014 
  • New policies at Rikers as a result of the above: 7,800 new cameras, anonymous reporting, new force policy banning blows to the head, face, groin, neck, kidneys, and spinal column, as well as kicks and choke holds, throwing Corizon out of Rikers was also important 

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