Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who have severe mental disorders have ranged from 7 percent to 16 percent. The best studies suggest that approximately 10 percent of prisoners have severe mental disorders. Thus, approximately 231,000 individuals with severe mental disorders are incarcerated in the nation’s jails and prisons at any given time.

It appears that there is not a single county, among the 3,139 counties in the United States, in which the mental facility serving that county has as many individuals with severe mental disorders as does the county jail. And the situation continues to get worse.

The costs of such incarceration are enormous.

According to the Department of Justice (1996 Source Book: Criminal Justice Statistics), it costs American taxpayers a staggering $15 billion per year to house individuals with mental disorders in jails and prisons (300,000 incarcerated individuals with mental illness at a cost of $50,000 per person annually).

A major contributor to the costs is the fact that mentally ill prisoners are regularly rearrested because of the failure of community mental health services to provide treatment for them, which, in my opinion, is not the fault of the community mental health services. It is the lack of adequate resources from state and federal levels.

While some jails and prisons provide adequate psychiatric services to ill inmates, many do not. And, many corrections officers receive very little training in the special problems of caring for mentally ill inmates.

A 1992 study of American jails report found that the vast majority of U.S. jails do not provide adequate psychiatric services to inmates with serious mental disorders.

More than one in five jails have no access to mental health services of any kind.

Corrections officers in 84 percent of jails receive either no training or less than three hours training in the special problems of people with severe mental illness.

The majority of jail inmates with serious mental disorders who do have charges against them have been arrested for misdemeanors such as trespassing.

In examining police arrest records, researchers often find a direct relationship between the person’s mental disorder and the behavior that led to apprehension.

For example, a woman with schizophrenia was arrested for assault when she entered a department store and began rearranging the shelves because she had a delusion that she worked there; when asked to leave, she struck a store manager and a police officer.

Some experts believe for people with serious mental disorders, the effects of being in jail or prison are occasionally positive but more often negative.

Interestingly, many of those who claim that it was positive do so because they found being incarcerated was the only way they could get psychiatric treatment.

The source of information for this column is from the Treatment Advocacy Center.

I feel it's very important that we care for those who are in need. There are reasons for every action.