Jail is simply no place for individuals suffering from serious mental illness,
Terry Allen Kupers
even if the jail has a mental health tag.
In his op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Award-winning psychiatrist Terry Allen Kupers — author of Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It— discusses the role of mental health jails and their impact on prisoners. Kupers challenges us to see an alternative: “What if, instead of building a new mental health jail, the counties were to put an equivalent amount of public funds into community-based treatment programs? One way to move forward with that plan would be to identify the mental health programs in the community with proven efficacy, and then increase the budgets for those programs so they could accept many more clients who would otherwise be in jail.”
Read more from Terry on his thoughts on public mental health funding to help prisoners.
And read an excerpt from his book, Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It.
