Roth paints a devastating portrait of lives wrecked - or ended - in prisons, stories of sick people who never got the treatment they needed outside, and certainly didn’t receive it on the inside either. “Locking up vulnerable people in inhumane conditions is fundamentally immoral.” “We continue to treat people with mental illness almost exactly as we did before electricity was invented, before women had the right to vote and before the abolition of slavery,” she writes. America has never quite known what to do with the mentally ill, and Roth argues that the latest solution - lock them up! - is the worst option of all: morally wrong, medically wrong and economically wrong. Roth traces the long history of how we ended up with millions of incarcerated patients all the way back to Benjamin Franklin and the founding of the Republic. In “Insane,” Roth is looking to frame the incarceration and treatment of the mentally ill as the next civil rights issue. Michelle Alexander makes the case as pointedly as anyone that mass incarceration is, as she calls it, “The New Jim Crow.” Much has been written in recent years about the brutal racial disparity in American incarceration that has locked away generations of black men at a rate dramatically outpacing that of whites. We don’t know how to take care of people with mental illness.” “We, as deputies, we know how to arrest people. “We’re not psychiatrists,” Alejandro Fernandez, a Los Angeles corrections official, tells Roth in one of the book’s many interviews with front-line observers. The poor conditions inside are in fact making the sick even sicker.

Yet the American prison system is woefully unprepared to offer treatment or provide even basic mental health care to its wards. She cites a federal study that says 75 percent of women locked up are mentally ill. More than half the prisoners incarcerated in America suffer from some kind of mental illness, Roth writes. Some 70 years later, the journalist Alisa Roth has written a chilling book that argues that American jails and prisons have become de facto warehouses for the mentally ill, and that conditions inside have hardly improved from the horrors Maisel uncovered. “Through public neglect and legislative penny-pinching, state after state has allowed its institutions for the care and cure of the mentally sick to degenerate into little more than concentration camps,” Maisel wrote.

Maisel, featured scathing anecdotes of routine abuse, starvation diets, overcrowded bathrooms and cynical charades of treatment that mocked the very word. In 1946, Life magazine published an exposé that declared most American mental hospitals “a shame and a disgrace.” The report, by Albert Q. INSANE America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness By Alisa Roth 320 pp.

Insane by alisa roth