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Dear Sylvia and all,This subject has been very hard for me for years. I have personally visited as an inspector our local county jail (twice) and heard first hand accounts from a formal visitor (and all jails have a no hostage policy) to a State prison. They are unusually hard places to visit especially when you consider the shameful color coordination. Even when a county jail has a dedicated with funding mental health ward there is still a very loud color disparity happening. Mainly that the jails are mostly filled with people of darker colors and males. There is something wrong with the picture. My last visit to the county jail was extremely sad because the brown boys looked barely of age to be there!! They get a record, they get out of school, the brown eyes look so hopeless.Let me add, that I have been very recently in a few MH hospitals and it is so easy for attitude to prevail. Brown people seem to be scarier to some staffpersons when they are in distress. It is an easy path to the jail versus hospitalization or adequate treatment. There is research about how easy it is to overmedicate, and scare a person of color who is having mental distress, it is quite common to find these survivors in jail masking their symptoms out of fear. It is worse than awful. Maria Mar | ||||||||
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