Michele Gillen, an investigative reporter at WFOR-TV in Miami, has exposed the inhumane conditions in which mentally ill inmates are being housed in local jails. (Click here for Part One, here for Part Two, here for Miami’s reaction to the story and here for readers’ responses.)
It is a fact, according to a 2005 “Frontline” report, that there are more mentally ill inmates in prisons and jails than there are mental patients in hospitals.
They are stored away in a jail floor known to prison insiders as “the forgotten floor.” You can watch Gillen’s stories online. Ask yourself what you would find if you looked locally. In Miami, the local jail’s chief psychiatrist said that the conditions in which mentally ill patients are forced to live are “morally reprehensible.” I suspect that the public defenders who represent these inmates, some of whom are awaiting trial, might help you get the information that you need to tell these stories.
There is no doubt this is a national (and local) problem. Click here for an interactive map, compiled by PBS’ “Frontline,” which will give you state by state figures on the number of mentally ill housed in your prisons and jails.
As the rising number of mentally ill inmates shows no sign of abating, those working inside the nation’s prisons are struggling with a system designed for security, not treatment. Corrections officers now have the responsibility of not only securing inmates, but also working with mental health staff to identify and manage disturbed prisoners.
“Providing effective psychiatric care in a maximum security prison is extraordinarily difficult,” says prison psychiatrist Gary Beven. “If you have untreated manic depression or bipolar disorder, untreated schizophrenia, somebody might be hallucinating and extremely paranoid. If you don’t identify the fact that [a] person has schizophrenia, if you don’t provide them with the proper medication, if you don’t place them in an environment that allows them to function at an adequate level, then it’s just a matter of time, perhaps, [that] something aggressive might occur.”
And because these inmates have difficulty following prison rules, a disproportionate number are placed in solitary confinement. “People who are just so unsocialized and so psychologically fragile to begin with are deprived of any kind of social support, any kind of psychological stimulus. And they just fall apart,” says Fred Cohen, a prison litigation specialist.
Of the nearly 2 million inmates being held in prisons and jails across the country, experts believe nearly 500,000 are mentally ill. According to the National Alliance [on Mental Illness] (NAMI), 16 percent of the prison population can be classified as severely mentally ill, meaning that they fit the psychiatric classification for illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder. According to staff at city and community jails, 25 percent of the jail population is severely mentally ill. However, when other mental illnesses, such as anti-social personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and depression, are included, the numbers are much higher, and NAMI puts the number of inmates suffering from both mental illness and substance abuse the percentage at well over 50 percent.
Look at this passage to get a taste of the larger problems:
Eventually, a majority of mentally ill inmates are released back into the community, generally with a limited amount of medication, little preparation, and sometimes no family or support structure. “We release people with two weeks’ worth of medication. Yet it appears that it’s taking three months for people to actually get an appointment in the community to continue their services … and if they don’t have the energy and/or the insight to do that, they’re going to fall through the cracks and end up back in some kind of criminal activity,” warns Debbie Nixon-Hughes, chief of the mental health bureau of the Ohio Department of Corrections.
Here are some more resources to help you go deeper on this topic.
Human Rights Watch issued a warning in 2003 about how ill-equipped jails and prisons are to handle the mentally ill. The U.S. director of that group said then, “Prisons have become the nation’s primary mental health facilities. But for those with serious illnesses, prisons can be the worst place to be.”
Back in 1999, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees raised concerns about how little training some employees were getting while still being asked to care for the mentally ill.
WFOR’s Michele Gillen, by the way, is no stranger to these kinds of stories. In years past, she has tackled such topics as domestic violence and abuse of the elderly in nursing homes.
Hugo Chávez‘ rant at the U.N. last week did for Noam Chomsky what Oprah does for less cerebral writers. Chávez sent Chomsky to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. Check locally. Anybody buying? Of course, book sales often follow news events — see this USA Today summary.
Working Past Retirement
More than three quarters of today’s workers (77 percent) expect to work for pay even after they retire, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Of those who feel this way, most say it’s because they’ll want to, not because they’ll have to.
States Maximize Minimum Wage
By January 2007, 23 states will have minimum wages higher than the federal rate ($5.15 per hour). Eleven states passed such laws this year alone. Six more states will put the question to voters in November.
Here are some more resources for you as you pursue this story:
- U.S. Department of Labor: minimum mage resource page
- Minimum-wage laws by state (interactive map by the Department of Labor, updated April 2006)
- “Minimum-wage hikes sweep states,” Stateline.org (Sept. 22, 2006)
- Stateline.org’s interactive 2007 minimum-wage map (state by state)
- State minimum wage information from Automatic Data Processing Inc. (useful for a handful of states)
- The AFL-CIO, in its effort to campaign for a higher minimum wage in states across the country, also has a page that you might find helpful. It boils down, in a rollover-map format, state minimum wages and it identifies states in which campaigns to raise the minimum wage are actively being waged.
Auctions Get More Popular
As the housing market slugs along, homeowners desperate to sell are turning to auctions. The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times says auctions are up this year. The story included this passage:
“Last year I was getting 10 calls a week,” said Michael Peters, president of Clearwater’s American Heritage Auctioneers. “This year, I’m getting 10 to 15 calls a day.”
The 400 Richest Americans
Gates and Buffett still top the list. To make it to the top 400, you have to be at least a billionaire. I didn’t see any journalists on it. Of the top 11 on the list, five were Wal-Mart-related and two were Microsoft-related. Publishers and media people did OK. Names like Murdoch, Redstone, Newhouse (twice) and Bloomberg all appear on the top 50. Univision’s A. Jerrold Perenchio came in 85th. Mark Cuban was 133rd on the list.
20 Things I Learned in Iceland
My buddy, CBS photojournalist Les Rose, and I did some teaching at RUV Television in Iceland last week. Iceland is a remarkable country that is attracting tourists and investment from around the world — and with good reason. It is a very cool place. Here are 20 things I learned about Iceland that I thought you would want to — and should — know.
1.) It does not snow as much as it used to in Iceland, and the glacial ice is shrinking
2.) When you order a cheese pizza in Iceland, you also get jam with it. I do not know why.
3.) Yes you can buy whale meat in restaurants. Icelanders told me they see whales as a resource, just as they think of cows or sheep as a resource. They also said they don’t like other countries to tell them what to do.
4.) Those cute little puffins that are pretty much the symbol of Iceland also are reportedly tasty to eat.
5.) For many Icelanders, their home heat and hot water comes from geothermal energy.
6.) I saw a hydrogen filling station for cars in Reykjavik.
7.) Tourists are warned not to stick their hands/feet into geysers because they will be scalded.
8.) It is not customary to tip taxi drivers. Taxi drivers often drive really nice Mercedes cars.
9.) Icelanders are very nice. Les and I walked into a record store, bought nothing and they gave him a free soda. Didn’t bother to take his money. Another time, we were paying for a cab, and started digging around for the money — they told us to just give them enough money to make it close enough to call it even.
10.) I never once heard a person honk a horn in traffic.
11.) The unemployment rate is pretty close to zero (officially, the 2005 estimate was 2.1 percent).
12.) The sales tax rate is 24.5 percent. (That is not a typo.) Icelanders pay a 14 percent tax on groceries. As visitors leave the country, they get a 15 percent refund on the sales taxes they paid on purchases of $40 or more. Wool stuff doesn’t count, though — you pay the full tax on that.
13.) Nearly half of the 300,000 Icelanders live in Reykjavik.
14.) There are very few trees in Iceland. The soil is shallow, there is a lot of wind and volcanic rock covers a lot of the countryside. The old joke is that if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up.
15.) Iceland has some wonderful geysers. This one is about half as big as Old Faithful and blows about every 10 minutes. There are no park rangers standing around, protecting people from getting too close.
16.) Iceland also has waterfalls — lots of them. This is the biggest of them — a glacier-fed waterfall named Gullfoss. My guide told me “Don’t forget: This is fed by a glacier. If you fall in, it will be a waste of time and money to look for you.”
17.) I saw a grand total of one police officer in my five days in Iceland.
18.) I did not see a single crime story on any Iceland TV station.
19.) Greenland has a lot more ice than Iceland and Iceland is a lot greener than Greenland.
20.) You won’t see power lines or phone lines cluttering up your view. They are all buried, except for the ones that are way out in the countryside.
Trusting Attractive People
A new study from Rice University says we tend to trust attractive people more than unattractive people, and we also expect more from them. Researchers call it the “beauty premium.”
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Editor’s Note: Al’s Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
