The criminalization of
mental illness

Editors, Asheville Global Report,

I am grateful for your coverage of many items in AGR #164. In reading Katherine Stapp’s “US prisons double as mental wards,” on p. 3, several thoughts came to my mind in this asylum in the Florida gulag.

What Katherine says is nothing new. We’ve long known about criminalization of insanity by imprisonment of those whose helplessness or hopelessness is rooted in mental illness. Funnily, no one is sentenced to such queer punishment. It may be cruel, but [is] not so unusual these days.

It’s nice that in some cases non-violent offenders with documented mental illnesses may get treatment instead of going to jail. For all, including those who are imprisoned, treatment should not be excluded because doing so only negates the root of the problem. Isn’t recidivism a real concern at all? The former prison psychologist now an Ohio congressman, Ted Strickland, seems to think so. He seems to know his business.

Gerald Niles
NFRC West Unit
Lake Butler, Florida