An eye-opening book that cries out for change.- Kirkus (starred review)Īlisa Roth's powerful new book.calls into question such simplistic solutions to the current crisis in our mental health-care system.Based on in-depth interviews and observations, the book provides revealing snapshots of conditions at New York City's Rikers Island, the Los Angeles County jail, and Chicago's Cook County jail, the nation's de facto three largest mental health-care providers.- Democracy JournalĬhilling.Roth writes movingly of the human toll of incarceration.She convincingly diagnoses the glaring inadequacies of mental health treatment in prison but she is not out for scapegoats. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.Ī searing exposé about the criminalization of mental illness.Though the subject matter dictates that much of the book is relentlessly depressing, the author is such a talented information gatherer and fluid stylist that the narrative becomes compulsive reading. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. Now updated to cover the latest developments in criminal justice reform, Insane is a stirring call to action for anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.Īn urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons from a veteran public radio journalist.Īmerica has made mental illness a crime.
She also explores some of the most innovative solutions to the problem, showing that large-scale fixed at many levels of the mental health and criminal justice system are within reach. Roth provides the first comprehensive account of America's mental health crisis - and uncovers the hidden forces behind it.
She brings readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County Jail to a women's prison in Oklahoma with one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country.
About the Book Insane takes journalist Alisa Roth deep inside our prisons and jails to show how and why they have become warehouses for people with mental illness, institutions rife with improper treatment and outright abuse.
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