A very good friend recently became a prison visitor. It’s part of some mentoring scheme and like most of us, she’s always believed those sent to prison were convicted criminals who deserved their fate.
Faced now with the reality she has an entirely different perspective.
She’s overwhelmed by the number of inmates she’s met who (in her opinion) should clearly not be in prison.
These are individuals with mental health problems who need to be in hospitals specialising in their care and rehabilitation rather than locked up alongside hard-core offenders.
This is the result of the indefensible ‘care in the community’ programme where psychiatric units were sold off to developers and patients pushed onto the streets with a minimum of support.
A lot of people gained massively from this flawed policy but it wasn’t the mentally ill or their families who simply had the rug pulled out from under them.
So now it appears prison is the dumping ground for many sufferers of mental disorder.
My friend is horrified and feels the public should be aware of this use of prison facilities and ask the question: Could the government treat any other category of sufferers this way?
So how do they get away with it? The mentally ill are the weakest tier in society. They don’t attract celebrity backing and have little ability to organise themselves. If some homeless guy, unable to string an intelligible sentence together, is sent down, who cares?
My friend cares, well she does now. Perhaps we should take a closer look at what goes on inside our prisons?
Maybe the answer to overcrowding is to send those with mental health issues to suitable hospitals and not simply dump them in prison?
