Back in 1972, Geraldo Rivera, who was still a reporter, opened the nation’s eyes to the deplorable condition and abuse heaped upon children at Staten Island’s Willowbrook School for mentally retarded children. It was appalling, and Americans were shocked when Rivera exposed the deplorable conditions.
The solution was to end the large scale warehousing of children, and later adults, in these megafacilities where they were kept out of the public eye and everyone forgot about them. Out of sight, out of mind. What happened in Willowbrook stayed in Willowbrook. But as the New York Times reports, closing the nation’s Willowbrooks, which made everyone feel quite proud of themselves for being so concerned for the welfare of children and the mentally ill and incompetent, was no solution.
Over the years, mentally ill adults, given new rights and freedoms after the scandal, exercised their right to live in squalor on the street, with a cardboard box as their shelter in subzero weather. But at least people realized this unintended consequence, if for no other reason than they had to step over them to get to their limousines. Children, on the other hand, remained out of sight.
The New York Times reports on what became of the children.
As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.Like a society with attention deficit syndrome, we’ve forgotten that there are mentally ill children. It’s so much easier to pigeonhole them as criminals, and with false bravado, demand that be treated like the animals they are. Of course, this serves the dual purposes of getting them out of our sight and making us feel that we’ve achieved safety and justice, as if mentally ill children without resources to help them to co-exist peacefully in society reduces them to the class of animal to which we ascribe all other criminals.
“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”
The problem is that prisons aren’t intended or equipped to deal with mentally ill children. They try, if for no other reason than self-preservation, but the best they can hope to achieve is relative isolation and mind-numbing drugs. They aren’t there to be cured, or stabilized so that they can return to society, but to prevent them from doing harm to others or, more likely, being the victim of others’ harm. It’s costly. It’s difficult. It’s ineffective. It’s all we’ve got.
What amazes is how we’ve turned a blind eye to the fact that these are children. Sick children. Our hearts go out to children who suffer tragic harm in automobile accidents. But we have no room left for sympathy for children who suffer from mental illness. To a large extent, we have still not accepted that mental illness, like bipolar disorder, is real. Many adults, who have never had the pleasure of having one of their children suffer, refuse to believe in a disease they can’t see or feel. Rather than see mentally ill children as sick, they are simply bad. They will tell you that a good smack will fix these bad kids up real fast. Who’s insane now?
By the time they find themselves embroiled in the juvenile justice system for having done sufficient damage to warrant the attention of the law, they aren’t as cute and cuddly as they once were. Their faces have sneers and chances are pretty good that their conduct can be characterized in adult terms, making them appear far more analogous to the vicious than the sick.
There was once a time when we believed that boys and girls who had yet to reach the age of majority were still children. As children, they deserved society’s help and protection, rather than wrath. Is the best we can hope for today a prison cell and a heavy dose of Abilify? While people complain, and rightfully so, of the myriad of problems we face in a complex society in economic turmoil, there remains one discrete group that will never have the ability to lift itself out of its problems, it’s pit, and therefore deserves, more than any other, our care and concern. These are our children. Do it for the children.
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No problem.
Care for them is defined, created, paid (and rationed) under the House version of the Health Care bill, H.R. 3200, page 494.
Looks like they will mostly just get counselor services.
I have been working on this problem for the past eight years and we are slowly creeping in the right direction.
The prevailing attitude in my county is that the mentally ill do not belong in jail. As a consequence we have been able to divert some of them but most of the assaultive ones are still detained in jail because if they refuse to be admitted or assault the staff at a psychiatric hospital they are sent to jail.
We have been able to reduce the number of juveniles placed in detention by using risk assessment tools more effectively but that has been sold as a cost saving measure not as a more humane way of dealing with juvenile offenders.
I recently looked at the age at prison inmates at the time of arrest and fount that 7% were juveniles when arrested. They entered prison by transfer from a juvenile facility or because of a parole/probation violation. I suspect that a lot of them have some type of mental health issue that was aggravated by alcohol/drug abuse.
I tried three times to see what page 494 said, but the size of HR 3200 keeps crashing my computer, so I’m going to have to take your word for it, though I’m not persuaded that this is directed toward this specific issue rather than the generic coverage of mental illness. That said, I’m not surprised that the bill fails to provide adequate coverage of mentally ill children. As long as they are imprisoned, they aren’t a societal priority. And it’s not like they are covered now, or that a Republican health care plan would do any better, meaning that your shooting blanks at HR 3200 (I thought you would enjoy my gun analogy).
Internally, I think most of us have long been aware of the connection between mental illness and crime. But this hasn’t translated to broader external recognition, such that member of the general public who want to stop crime will support making the treatment of mental illness a priority.
Mental illness. Sometimes I think the only thing I know about it is: there’s a lot of it out there.
It is a difficult thing to recognize. We are hard wired to interpret someone’s behavior and speech as being fully intentional. You have to see someone with a traumatic brain injury, before and after, to fully appreciate that with some kinds of brain or psychological problems, words or behavior that seem voluntary at first glance really aren’t.
Dealing with that reality is difficult, too. But we’ll never deal with it until we at least recognize it.
Sorry about that. I was caught up in a wave of cynicism.
‘No’, I imagine any bill from the Republican would have been just as bad if not non-existant. I’m OK with non-existant by the Feds. The state governments would be much better suited to deal with the problem (if they were so inclined).
If the Feds were really so intent on solving these problems, they would start with the military, i.e. a much controlled environment that is also within their purvue. While there aren’t many children in the military, there are certainly dependant children of military personnel that would qualify.
I’d wager that charitable organizations would be best at dealing with juvenille mental illness but a level of accountability would be lost at that point.
Thanks for the gun analogy. I’ll keep hurling projectiles at HR3200 until the Senate comes up with something worse.
A few years ago, as an adult in my late 40’s, I had a manic episode that lasted a couple of years. I landed in jail 5-6 times and was assaulted by jailers more than once. And that was as an adult who more-or-less knew how to take care of himself. I can just imagine how they’d treat some manic kid.
It’s pretty disgusting.
Good point about the military. The treatment of mental illness post military, whether PTSD or TBI, is a total disgrace. Everything else aside, these men and women suffer for having served their country. Politicians can shove their rhetoric up their butts; take care of your soldiers. No excuses.