“Insane” give us an inside look at a system that seems opaque and impossible to understand from the outside. The largest providers of psychiatric care in the United States are not hospitals, but jails. The criminal justice system, one could say, is thus set up to entrap those with mental illness in a vicious circle of punishment and deprivation: if discipline, and not rehabilitation and treatment, is the goal, then it seems unlikely those with mental illness can improve their lives in anyway once entering the system.Īnd enter the system, they probably will. Solitary confinement, known to cause mental illness symptoms in otherwise healthy people, only exacerbates existing mental illness - and its rampant use is examined in “Insane.” “It’s hard to convince courts to find solitary confinement is unconstitutional,” says Roth, saying that “on a practical level,” jails and prisons don’t have many other “tools” of discipline. Those are staggering numbers - and people with mental health issues are more likely to be arrested, less likely to make bail, more likely to get a longer sentence, more likely to end up in solitary, and less likely to make parole. Roth’s book has come out at a crucial point, as interest in prison reform and justice surges nationwide.Īnd for good reason, as Roth explains in her debut book: We’re jailing more people than ever before, and up to half of our enormous prison population may have mental illness.
Alisa Roth, journalist and longtime reporter at Marketplace, turns her lens to the treatment of mental illness in the criminal justice system in her first book, “Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment Of Mental Illness.” Roth applies her years of experience dealing with tough subject matter - she’s investigated across a slew of beats from the Syrian refugee crisis to the treatment of PTSD in veterans - and gives insight into the media-shy world of American prisons - and the mental health crises within - in her first book, released this past April.
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