Paton Blough has served multiple jail terms as a result of mental illness.
He said his various offenses included brandishing a shotgun, reckless endangerment, destruction of civic property, spitting on a police officer, being a public nuisance and threatening a public official. Never was he charged with being mentally ill. That isn’t a crime, after all. But there was no doubt about why he had ended up in jail.
Blough, 38, has had bipolar disorder since his late teens. At times delusions convinced him of a worldwide conspiracy against him involving police officers, former President George W. Bush and Nazi ghosts.
“Can you imagine if we had two million people locked up for having a heart condition?” Blough, whose last arrest was six years ago, said in a telephone interview last week from his home in Greenville, South Carolina. “Well guess what? We have two million people locked up with a health condition called mental illness.”
In many places, police, judges and elected officials increasingly are pointing out that a high proportion of people in jail are mentally ill, and that in many cases they shouldn’t be there. In recent years, many cities and counties have tried to reduce those numbers by training police to deal with mental health crises, creating mobile mental health units to assist officers, and establishing mental health support centers as an alternative to jail, among other measures.
(Generally, local jails house inmates who are awaiting adjudication or who have short sentences, and they are run by local jurisdictions. State prisons, or penitentiaries, are where inmates serve sentences after conviction. They are the responsibility of the states.)
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People with heart conditions usually comply with their medication orders because they want to get better. Mentally ill patients don't think they are sick, so many times they stop taking medicine they need to keep them sane and that's when they go off the deep end. The problem is how do you give them their freedom without infringing on their rights (making them take the meds). Sometimes the only way is to admit them to a mental hospital where they can be monitored, given meds and treated.
ReplyDeleteIf this is so , then the entire African American population is mentally ill.
ReplyDelete3:45 Not all of them. Some aren't like that.
ReplyDeleteThen do society a big favor. The next time this mental idiot assaults someone or is carrying any type of weapon, just blow him away and let decent civilized people live in peace by eradicating this idiot and his faulty gene pool. I feel for his illness but enough is enough.
ReplyDelete12:31 AM
ReplyDeleteby your reasoning, we should blow you away as well. enough is enough
There used to be places for people like this. Not quite prisons, but they weren't free to leave, either. Since our priorities are messed up as a nation, the funds dried up to keep them running.
ReplyDelete