She also surveys a range of efforts to address the problem, making the case for a large-scale overhaul of mental health care and criminal justice. Investigating police departments, courts, jails, and emergency health-care facilities across the country, Roth provides the first nationwide account of this mental health crisis-and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She introduces us to ordinary people whose untreated mental illnesses drive them repeatedly into the justice system-and in some cases, to their deaths. She takes readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County jail to the women's prisons of Oklahoma, which have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America's tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. As many as half the people in US jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. The country's three largest providers of mental health care are not hospitals, but jails. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with mental illness.
"Alisa Roth's Insane clearly and objectively lays out the extent and history of our abandonment of the mentally ill while setting forth thoughtful pathways forward.This book should be required reading for any person involved with the criminal justice system or legislatures." - Thomas J.In America, having a mental illness has become a crime.
"Extensively researched and exquisitely written, Insane is a must read for policymakers, mental health professionals, mental health consumers and their families, and the general public." - Elyn R. This is essential reading for anyone who cares about how our country treats its most vulnerable citizens." - David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU and author of Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed "With heartbreaking stories of suffering, Alisa Roth shines a much-needed light on the crisis that afflicts the overwhelming number of mentally ill people locked away behind bars, where they are not treated but abused. Insane is a sobering and profoundly important read for any American with a conscience." - Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy "Alisa Roth lays bare the true costs of incarcerating, rather than attempting to help, our nation's mentally ill citizens.
An eye-opening book that cries out for change - but can policymakers show the resolve to make that change?" - Kirkus
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