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Sylvia Caras wrote:
It puts great stress on inmates when their “cellies” are mentally ill, so great that they must sleep with one eye open and be afraid for their lives at all times.We all need to take responsibility. The state of Ca. spends 2-billion dollars a year on forensic mental-health, that is in-adequate, barbaric,and in-humane. A look at Pelican Bay, or any other institution, in this state, says to me anyway, major reform is needed. Taking this another step, we also need to look at how and why these folks got there in the first place. Many could have been diverted away, either into other modalities, or quite frankly given the opportunity of having appropriate, tolerant community-based treatment to begin with, they might never have ended up being dumped into the criminal justice system in the first place. One of the biggest contributing factors to failed public policy in this country is the war on drugs. As long as we keep treating drugs as an issue for the criminal justice system,as oposed to a heath problem,we are going to conteniue to lock up more people for more time the three strikes law is another punitive way for socicity to get its quick-fix,along with the politicians that went along with there knee jerk reaction to being soft on crime. The one issue I’m continuing to work on as a member of the la.lasd.strategic advis. board C.R.I.M.M.I.O was to put together a program for inmates who had a high propensity to returning to state prison. They’re 100% dually DXed with a prior felony conviction and a major mental illness. This program is a closely monitored triple AAA ISA program, the supervision is provided by probation and the sherriff’s dept. This is a voluntary program, they no time off for becoming part of this pilot, basically it’s intensive case managment with a ratio — of no more then 10-1 highly trained staff, that are multi-disciplined. Ron Schraiber, myself,and Pearl Johnson have been on this board for over 2 and half years, this was formerly M.I.O.I.A.R mentally ill crime reduction bla bla bla, names and acronyms drive me mad. Ron and I did a lot of work together on this we did the first ever focus groups in the men’s central jail, we created are own tools for data collection and had a number of other focus groups at other facilities. We fought hard on a number of issues on philosophy, some we won others we lost, the inportent thing was in the end a program was developed,it could be argued maybe not the best, but we worked hard and it’s starting to be implemented.....The main reason I’m going into all of this is that those cellies or prisoners get out a majority at some point in time. 
The high rate
of recividism is also what ab-34 is about, creating linkage and programs
for this very high at risk group of folks.
The state c.d.c. is looking
carefully at CRIMMIO, and is in the process of evaluating if they want to
replicate this program for state prison released inmates.The current state of treatment in the parolee outpatient clinics is catastrophic. Everyday I see and work with parolees who have been out less then a week and they have at least two paper violations or worse. .. They are a very challenging group of consumers and convicts, the parole agents can be real cool or cold as ice. Our job is to offer some hope to the hopeless and create some alternatives. Having been on the other side of the wire so to speak I get a lot of joy in watching some of them struggle and make it. I can’t speak enough about the the criminalization of the mentally ill, because it’s a bloody horror show. Anything we can do in a positive way to help, prevent and keep discharged inmates from reoffending and end up going back in needs to be a priority, that includes women and juveniles, this is an issue that brings my passion out. You would have to have experienced it from the inside out to a degree, but you don’t need to be a rocket-scientist to figuire out what a mess it is. Gerald MinskLamp-ab-34 staff advocate | ||||||||
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