Yesterday, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) issued a compilation of staggering statistics on the criminalization of people with mental illness in the United States. As NAMI points out, “Over the past 20 years, state spending on correctional systems has increased 350 percent from $10 billion to $45 billion,” while the same states have cut […]
prisoners with mental illness
Suicide and Solitary Confinement in New York State Prisons
An important new Special Report in the Poughkeepsie Journal documents the increase in suicides in New York State prisons–and its relationship to solitary confinement. The reporter, Mary Beth Pfeiffer, has a long history of documenting the plight of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system. For this latest report, she filed FOIA requests and […]