Rosalynn Carter on Jails as Mental Health Facilities

Is it true, as Rosalynn Carter asserts, that jails and prisons are the largest mental health facilities in America? You can get money for incarceration, the former first lady says, but not - because of the lingering stigma - for the treatment of mental illness.

Mrs. Carter has been at this for 39 years, advocating, raising awareness, and doing everything she can to shed the light of day on a major social problem that is still too often relegated to the shadows. Like her husband, she's still going strong. Earlier this month, she appeared on The Daily Show to discuss her new book, Within Our Reach, with Jon Stewart.

Her claim that 1 in 4 Americans is mentally ill is certainly open for argument. I suppose it depends on how one defines "mentally ill." But she's right, isn't she, about jails and prisons? Haven't they become a dumping ground for people with mental health issues?

Atul Gawande, Truth-teller

Clay Shirkey’s book Here Comes Everybody is about the current rage for online social networking, not prison conditions. But in asserting that humans are social by nature, he illustrates the point by asking us to consider the consequences of completely depriving someone of social contact during incarceration.

“One of the most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contact is harsher still.”

Sharkey published these words in 2008. Early in 2009, Atul Gawande probed the soul-destroying experience of long-term solitary confinement in prison and concluded that it amounts to torture. The March 30 issue of The New Yorker contains his disturbing essay “Hellhole,” which should be required reading for all Americans. The depth of the degradation it depicts will not leave you unchanged.