Later, when he turned violent, correction officers with no access to his medical records or understanding of the care he needed put him in solitary confinement. Roth provides a deeply disturbing synthesis of her research, both academic and in the field, including conversations with professionals, and the mentally ill, to show how despite the increased understanding of mental illness over the last two centuries, and apart from the development of more effective medications, 'we continue to treat people with mental illness almost exactly as we did before electricity was invented.' In one of the more unsettling examples, a businessman and former firefighter with bipolar disorder was arrested for indecent exposure after he stripped naked in the hallway of a hotel when he was unable to open the door to his room. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.Marketplace reporter Roth's cri de coeur uses moving anecdotes of how the American criminal justice system treats the mentally ill to make the problem palpable. She also surveys a range of efforts to address the problem, making the case for a large-scale overhaul of mental health care and criminal justice. Investigating police departments, courts, jails, and emergency health-care facilities across the country, Roth provides the first nationwide account of this mental health crisis-and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She introduces us to ordinary people whose untreated mental illnesses drive them repeatedly into the justice system-and in some cases, to their deaths. She takes readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County jail to the women's prisons of Oklahoma, which have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America's tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.

As many as half the people in US jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. The country's three largest providers of mental health care are not hospitals, but jails. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with mental illness. Summary: In America, having a mental illness has become a crime.

Insane alisa roth