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Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

Prison: The New Mental Hospital

Author:     MIKE KESSLER
Source:     Takepart
Publication Date:     22-Jan-14
 Link: Prison: The New Mental Hospital
Stephan:   Years ago I was speaking at the Salk Institute along with a number of prominent psychologists and psychiatrists. At dinner one night they began talking about how they had all participated, during the Nixon Administration, with the closing of mental hospitals all over the country. They had deep regrets about this because the out-patient facilities that were supposed to replace those residential facilities were never actually built. The conclusion of all of them was that "the prison system is going to end up being the mental health system," which they universally regarded as a sick and Dickensian outcome. Well, the years have gone by and, as this report makes clear, that is exactly what has happened.

When Lockinvar Jacobs stepped off the bus at L.A.’s Union Station last summer, he wasn’t quite sure where to go. The 49-year-old schizophrenic had just been released from state prison, where he’d done a five-year bid for felony drug sales. It wasn’t his first time getting out of the big house; he told me, when we spoke recently, that he’s spent between 16 and 20 years of his life behind bars for drugs and other nonviolent felonies, such as burglary. He couldn’t be sure of the exact number, he said, because the Haldol and other meds have clouded his memory. What he was sure about was that this last time, he was released without his medication.

Jacobs had less than 48 hours to report to a county probation officer; if he failed to appear, he could face ‘flash incarceration,” meaning he’d get tossed into L.A. County Jail for a week or two. California prisons provide up to $200 gate money for releasees, but Jacobs needed clothes before he left the prison, for which the state had charged him $43. With $157 left over, his first stop would be a Skid Row shelter he knew well. There, he was told the probation […]

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