>
>Similar to the other 'terror' tactic: keeping the beggars on the streets
>and in plain sight of everyone, when it would take next to nothing to
>feed them and house them.
>
>Joanna
Less than nothing when compared with the blowback costs. The study cited in this article also finds that mentally ill inmates were substantially more likely to have been homeless in the year before their arrest:
>Mental Ills Common in Prison, Jail
>
>More than half of U.S. inmates have problems, a report says. Experts
>blame serious gaps in mental health care in the community.
>
>By Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
>
>September 7, 2006
>
>[....]
>
>Mental health experts called the study disturbing. They said it
>illustrated a direct relationship between gaps in community mental
>health care and the large numbers of mentally ill people winding up
>in the criminal justice system.
>
>"If one out of three people incarcerated in this country are
>receiving mental health treatment, it shows that there is something
>very wrong with the way services are delivered in the community,"
>said Bill Emmet of the Washington-based Campaign for Mental Health
>Reform, a coalition of advocacy groups. "People need services before
>they do something that might result in their incarceration."
>
>The report comes as California struggles to cope with an
>overcrowding crisis that has made caring for mentally ill inmates
>increasingly difficult. More than 172,000 inmates are jammed into
>the state's 33 prisons, with 16,000 of them in gyms, hallways and
>other spaces not intended as housing. By next summer, corrections
>officials said, they will be out of room altogether.
>
>In 1995, the corrections department settled a class-action lawsuit
>over inmate mental health care, agreeing to improve treatment. But
>serious problems remain.
>
>"We consider the system in crisis," partly because crowding has
>reduced space for treatment and has increased tensions among
>convicts, said Jane Kahn, an attorney representing inmates in the
>long-running case.
>
>"It's very difficult even to get men out onto the [prison] yard or
>in any kind of recreational program," Kahn said, "which just adds to
>the problems facing the mentally ill."
[....]
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons7sep07,1,203828,print.story