Effectiveness of Mental Health in Reducing Criminal Rate

“It is time to end the era of mass incarceration,” Hillary Clinton delivered in her speech as a presidential candidate, appealing Americans to rethink about what is the best for society and how we approach prison system reform. According to the World health organization, large numbers suffer from mental or behavioral disorders all over the world especially prevalent in prison. “Criminals need mental health care”, by Robert Byron is an article about the important relationships between mental health care and criminals and, more specifically, for criminals with mental disorders. Byron asserts that despite our society’s views toward defendants end up with incarcerating, in Forensic hospitals where treat offenders as patients who can be recuperated to be law-abiding citizens through mental support. This essay focuses on responding to Byron’s exploration of ideas put forth about the recidivism rate among released inmates, reasons for unemployment in the manufacturing sector and society is responsible for the crime.

Summary

One of the purposes of Byron’s article is to make statements and respond to current prison system: “Society is better served by treating mentally ill offenders than by incarcerating them”. (Byron, 2014) Offenders with mental illnesses should be cured with mental treatment to reduce the rate of recidivism rather than imprisoning. For example, Byron analyses a study from California, New York and Oregon, Victoria Harris, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Washington that untreated mentally ill offenders reoffended at a much higher rate than that of Forensic patients. They are less likely to re-offend and turn to violence compared to those offenders who do not receive mental treatment. In further development of this idea, Byron mentions that the public is playing a vital role, including our society’s views toward mental illness and support to whether the treatment work in breaking the cycle of crime. For Byron, it is as much by necessity, as by cured of inmates that social stability is reinforced. Byron also discusses that the chronic reoffending due to the unsuccessful prison system. The invention of antipsychotic medication and restriction of coverage for mental health led to close down the psychiatric hospitals and increase drug-related arrests. Ultimately, it caused adverse effects to disordered individuals and society such as drift, homelessness and further mental decline. According to Jason Schnittker, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleague reported that legislatures have criminalized substance abuse as psychiatric disorders which means some inmates end up in prison because of drug addiction while most of them in prison not being treated properly.

The rate of incarceration and the probability of recidivism were rising for the past 40 years. Byron states that the prison system clearly does not work while using comparisons and outcomes of two systems to support that forensic hospitals have positive influences to cure offenders. Therefore, he concludes the results that the forensic hospitals work effectively for disordered offenders in reducing the rate of violent offenses based on the experience in Connecticut. In terms of the treatment expenditures, Byron indicates that people’s concern toward a large amount of money; which is cheaper to keep mentally ill criminals in prison. No matter offenders are disordered or not, they are supposed to undertake the due obligations for their crime. Byron believes that whoever suffer symptoms and mental disorders were caused by conditions, circumstances or genetics are irresponsible to blame. Society are borne the costs ultimately. The lack of people in the nation’s manufacture is closely related to the rising number of incarceration. The solutions to the problem, according to Byron, are for offenders to treat them mentally instead of incarcerating them and provide work helps to redeem themselves from weakness.

Response 1

What I prefer the best about Robert Byron’s article is his effective use of results to clarify the issues of the ineffective prison system which the rate of recidivism for disordered offenders is significantly higher than that of the one who does not receive mental treatment. Indeed, I agree with him that criminals need mental health care. However, from my perspective, his findings provide potential evidence of mental health treatment in reducing recidivism involved inmates who suffer from mental disorder. There are the limitations in areas of this study since it “involved subjects not chosen at random and the defendant pool was limited to San Francisco”, (Byron 2014) and another set of the data he analyses in Annual Recidivism Report is based on the experience in Connecticut. It is unable to consider the study and compare subjects in other scopes of jurisdiction. Another limitation is that since the mental health court participants are selected as a small proportion in San Francisco under the regulatory authorities, any bias toward outside the city or state arrestment would unlikely to help the mental health recovery. Finally, the study may be affected by the difference of a given mental health court and San Francisco mental health court due to the various structure of them across nationwide coverage.

Response 2

I reckon that Byron’s idea is reasonable that work is the most important force in human being helps the reherelation process by realizing the reigning powers. It is appropriate that Byron (2014), considers that the rise in the number of people incarcerated has coincided closely with the evisceration of the nation’s manufacturing base. Nevertheless, the evisceration of the nation’s manufacturing base involved many main contributing factors such as globalization and automation. As the world is moving further toward globalization, companies’ trade and investment patterns trend to move overseas. In the manufacturing sector, to increase their global competitiveness, a growing number of investors are capitalizing on low wage labor, shifting employment arrangement to reduce production costs which are led to the high nation's’ unemployment rate. On the other hand, many small manufacturing industries are closing because of competition. According to Daily Nation, “About 2. 2 million small enterprises have closed shop over the last five years, underlining the tough challenges that the local business climate poses for investors”. (Ngugi 2016) On the part of automation, it is often argued that technology always creates masses of work; however, job destruction and income inequality are concerned. “Less educated workers are more likely to be replaced by automation than highly educated ones. ” (Rotman 2017) As reported by Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, that the governments are unprepared to cope with employment caused by automation and worker from different occupations have been replacing by automation primarily in manufacturing. In sum, globalization and automation put pressure on a nation’s manufacturing base, mainly for low skilled and less educated worker.

Response 3

Even though Byron mentions that the costs are borne by society, he does not directly show his opinion. It seems to me that, society is responsible for those who develop disorders by social factors such as conditions and environment. Chicago's perception on crime claimed criminals were profoundly influenced by the poverty and social instability. They stated that the environment and poor social could produce different kinds of crimes. In addition, “42% of crimes committed by the mentally ill are related to symptomatic expression and 30% are related to survival, leaving a small percentage directly linked to criminal behavior. ”(O’Keefe & Schnell, 2007) The people who go to prison have been dropped out from school; have turned to take drugs to mitigate the pain; have not been able to find a meaningful job; have become homeless and have been against the law. Individuals could contribute to society and become productive members if them mentally did not influence them. Most importantly, being responsible for mentally ill inmates would move us to a society with compassion where values people and treat them equally. Therefore, Crimes are a consequence of the lack of social regulation. We need to upgrade our educational system to prevent troubled students from dropping out, offering job training and employment opportunities and funding mental health care services effectively in our community. By focusing on these issues to improve our justice system, our country and world can be bettering.

Conclusion

Overall, however, it is important to pay attention to Byron’s views in order to realize that, while his thought and explanation are in the right place: mental health cares are necessary to be introduced for criminals and works are fundamental for both individual and nation for reintegration process, his interpretation of the data analysis is bias toward limited area and reasons caused by the evisceration of the nation’s manufacturing are fragmentary.