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Mental Health and Mass Incarceration

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Spaces and Interpretation. Law Inforcement. Deinstitutionalization. Race/Ethnicity. [Miscellany] | The Separating Sickness, by Rebecca Solnit. Eddie Bacon was a forklift operator at Trident Seafoods in Akutan, Alaska. In the summer of 1999, he developed mysterious rashes on his hands, arms, and legs. He visited a doctor, who gave him a variety of ointments, but they did nothing. He grew weak, lost weight. He had trouble seeing. No longer able to earn a living, he moved in to his parents’ house in central California. There, at a New Year’s Eve party in 2000, he passed out, and his parents took him to the emergency room. The Louisiana Leper Home was founded in 1894. Leprosy is really two diseases: the physical effects and the social response to them. The change started when doctors realized that leprosy, contrary to long-standing belief, is very nearly the least contagious contagious disease on earth: in more than a hundred years of Carville’s operation, no employee ever caught leprosy from a patient.

In 1941, a highly toxic tuberculosis drug, Promin, was shown to eradicate the bacterium that causes leprosy. Episode 27: No Place Like Home (9.25.2015) | Criminal. In the early 90s, a wealthy magazine publisher was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum security prison in Louisiana. But white collar criminals weren’t the only people living there, and the other people inside had basically been forgotten about by the outside world, some of them for decades.

Learn more about Neil White’s time at Carville in his memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. We’re going on tour! Tickets on sale now for live shows in Durham, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Click here for venue and ticket information. Prison Vendors See Continued Signs of a Captive Market. Is there anything that cannot be turned into a weapon? Walk around the exhibitors’ hall at the conference of the American Correctional Association, held in Indianapolis in early August, and at some point the question will answer itself.

Apparently, with enough malign intent and the right tools — a lighter, for instance — even disposable plates can be transformed into shivs. “This is a piece of Styrofoam, rolled, then heated, then rolled and heated some more,” said Michael Robertson, salesman for a company called JonesZylon. He handed over a dark brown, six-inch spike that looked nothing like a piece of Styrofoam. Photo “Now this,” he continued, handing over a plastic JonesZylon serving tray, “you can’t weaponize.” The tray is part of an extensive line of plastic kitchen products, including cups, plates and bowls, sold by the company. “You’d definitely feel it,” he said. “But,” a colleague said, “it won’t penetrate the skin.”

Mr. The convention is where those people window-shop. When Mr. Attica Prison Riot Demands Reflect Ferguson Commission Calls to Action. “The Attica Prison Move … is a tactical move towards going forward to show the world’s community people how to begin to end oppression and wretched, unjust prison incarceration.” — The Black Panther newspaper, Sept 18, 1971 It took 15 minutes for police to deactivate the Attica prison revolt via blitzkrieg. On September 9, 1971, Attica inmates overpowered 10 prison guards and placed them, in their words, “under arrest.” As history tells it it, they took the guards hostage. Whatever you call it, the reason inmates seized Attica was to draw attention to the “hostage crisis” they said they had been detained in for decades. By the time of the September Attica siege, the faction had radicalized and expanded its list of demands by five, including amnesty for the prisoners and their safe transport to a “non-imperialistic country.”

The state had rejected the demands regarding amnesty, and the governor refused to meet with the agitators at all. Current U.S. Traces of Destruction: The Emotional Work of Studying Painful History. I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past…–W.G. Sebald Two years ago, I was halfway through earning a degree in history, learning about the kinds of stories people tell in their historical scholarship. I was learning how to write well, and how to stitch together an image of a person or a place or an event from what had been left behind.

This is how we earned our degrees: find a dead man, woman, or place worthy of our time. Many pages later, CTRL+P and then a red grading pen. What happened between our subjects and ourselves was the stuff of one-page reflections and seminar discussions. Some of us found pieces of advice hidden in our syllabi. Writing about the past means engaging with the before — before an empire fell, or a river was polluted, or genocide was committed and perhaps forgotten. On Authority. Forward Through Ferguson Search Results mental health. The implications of putting the mentally ill behind bars instead of in hospitals. Walking down the concrete halls of a jail or prison in the United States, one out of every five prisoners you see probably has a serious mental illness. "What we're finding is that jails and prisons are really trying to do their best, but if you take a step back and think about it, it's just not a situation designed to care for someone who has an illness that causes them to either act out, not be able to understand commands, or to be in a situation where there are individuals that may want to victimize them or harm them," says John Snook, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center.

Jails or prisons, he says, are the worst places imaginable for people suffering from mental illness. And many of these people wind up in correctional facilities because of the way mental illness is seen by society. "Mental illness should be treated like any other illness, and when someone is struggling they should receive medical care," Snook says. What To Do If You Don’t Go To Jail | Now I Know. In 1999, a 22-year-old Missouri man named Cornealious Michael (“Mike”) Anderson held up a Burger King at gun point, making away with over $2,000 in cash.

Two months later he was captured and in July of 2000, Mike Anderson was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He appealed and, after serving ten months of his sentence, was released on bond pending review of his case. He lost his appeal in 2002 and a warrant was issued for his arrest, calling for his return to prison to serve out his sentence. Fast forward eleven and a half years later — the end of Mike Anderson’s thirteen year sentence. That brings us to the summer of 2013. Anderson was scheduled to be released from prison, but when officials at the Missouri Department of Corrections went to process Anderson’s release papers, they found a problem: he wasn’t actually in prison. But this isn’t a story of a prison break. And for nine years, Anderson remained a free man, out on bond. I was sleeping. At An Abandoned Philadelphia Prison, All Hell Breaks Loose. Hide caption An actor lurks in the Eastern State Penitentiary rotunda during "Terror Behind The Walls," in Philadelphia.

At night, the former prison transforms into America's largest haunted attraction outside of a theme park. Emily Bogle/NPR Hide caption Visitors wander near the entrance to "Terror Behind The Walls. " The penitentiary lay dormant for 20 years until preservationists convinced the city to keep it as a historic site. Emily Bogle/NPR Hide caption Cellblock 14 is closed to tourists to preserve it from further decay. Built in 1927, it included bars between the first and second floors to prevent prisoners from falling below if pushed.

Hide caption Taylor Vankooten (center) and Christina DuPree scream as an actor jumps out at them in 3-D. It was a bright and sunny autumn afternoon in Philadelphia. Eastern State Penitentiary is not only one of the nation's creepiest historic landmarks, but it is also one of its top haunted attractions. 'Terror Behind The Walls' Jen Manion: When White Liberals (and Black Elites) Make Things Worse. A historical perspective on language and the criminalization of African Americans. Cartoon criticizing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress By Jen Manion At the end of the month, the Justice Department will grant early release to 6,000 inmates from federal prisons as part of an ongoing effort to ease overcrowding and offer redress to harsh sentencing for drug related offenses. This is the largest one-day release in our country’s history. The word is finally out: The prison industrial complex destroys individuals, families, and communities.

This is not the first time the nation has been caught up in heated debate about the purpose and methods of punishment. The association between crime and African Americans was established both through the language of criminality, with deep roots in slavery. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition Act, making it the first state to pass a law abolishing slavery. Knight. The Vanishing of America’s Historic Mental Asylums. Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in 2011 (photograph by Jere Waldron, via Flickr) Between 1848 and 1890, dozens of grand mental asylums were built around the United States under the Kirkbride Plan, designed by Thomas Story Kirkbride. An architecture of fresh air and sunlight offered a very different curative approach from the crowded facilities that characterized earlier mental health treatment facilities. Now, after overcrowding and funding cuts brought horrid conditions to these spaces during the 20th century, the Victorian structures are disappearing, and many believe they’re taking a voiceless history with them.

According to a report from Preservationworks, which last month focused on Kirkbride preservation at its conference, there were once over 70 of these asylums, but now only 15 remain. Preserve Greystone is rallying to halt the demolition of Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, which began on April 6. November 5, 2014 January 23, 2012 March 2, 2015. Etheridge knight jr papers 1955 2004. On the American Paradox of Laissez Faire and Mass Incarceration - On the American Paradox of Laissez Faire and Mass Incarceration. What we come to believe — so often, in reality, mere fiction and myth — takes on the character of truth and has real effects, tangible effects on our social and political condition. These beliefs, these human fabrications, are they simply illusions?

Are they fantasies? Are they reflections on a cave wall? Over the past two centuries at least, brilliant and well-regarded thinkers have proposed a range of theories and methods to emancipate us from these figments of our imagination. They have offered genealogies and archaeologies, psychoanalysis, Ideologiekritik, poststructuralism, and deconstruction — to name but a few. Their writings are often obscure and laden with a jargon that has gotten in the way of their keen insights, but their central point continues to resonate loudly today: our collective imagination has real effects on our social condition and on our politics. It is important, it is vital to question what passes as truth. The belief in the free market has real effects. . [2] Id. Perth%20Monopoly%20Launch.

Prison Labor in America: How Is It Legal? Crops stretch to the horizon. Black bodies pepper the landscape, hunched over as they work the fields. Officers on horseback, armed, oversee the workers. To the untrained eye, the scenes in Angola for Life: Rehabilitation and Reform Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, an Atlantic documentary filmed on an old Southern slave-plantation-turned-prison, could have been shot 150 years ago. The imagery haunts, and the stench of slavery and racial oppression lingers through the 13 minutes of footage. The film tells two overlapping stories: One is of accomplishment against incredible odds, of a man who stepped into the most violent maximum-security prison in the nation and gave the men there—discarded and damned—what society didn’t: hope, education, and a moral compass.

Burl Cain, the warden of Angola Prison, which is in Louisiana, has created a controversial model for rehabilitation. Not quite. More than a century later, our prison labor system has only grown. Maybe we believe him. David Stojcevski's horrifying death in jail, explained. During his 17-day stay in jail, 32-year-old David Stojcevski lost 50 pounds, hallucinated, and experienced seizures and convulsions. It was all caught on a security camera that jailers were supposed to regularly watch. But no one helped — and Stojcevski died. Now, the FBI is investigating the death, according to Detroit News. The horrifying death of Stojcevski in the Macomb County, Michigan, jail — first reported by Local 4 — is drawing national attention as the latest example of horrific neglect and brutality by the criminal justice system. And unlike previous cases, it was all caught on video — making it easy to see exactly what went wrong.

But beyond the gruesome images and FBI investigation, Stojcevski's death speaks to a much larger problem in the criminal justice system: In many cases, jails aren't staffed, trained, or resourced to deal with cases like Stojcevski's. But they continue locking up excessive numbers of people, even when it might not be necessary. Local 4. Washington University conference looks at ways to reverse mass incarceration in the U.S. ST. LOUIS • Imagine investing $50 billion a year in a program that only has a 50 percent success rate....

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