Mentally Ill Offenders Should Not Be Diverted from Incarceration
Tripp Wolter and Tyler Dodson
University of Texas at Tyler
Not all offenders who are mentally ill should be able to use their illness as an excuse for the crimes they have committed, and while they are serving a prison sentence, they can receive treatment for their condition rather than representing a threat to their community. Many of the mentally ill become homeless due to not being able to secure funds for housing. This leads to the inability to obtain medication for their diseases meaning the hallucinations and delusions they see and hear consume that person. Being on the streets seeing and hearing things that are not real can lead to frustration and anger, putting the public in danger. Some mental illnesses…show more content… Yuval Melamed published a report in 2010 discussing the theory of “treatment years”. This idea is the court would determine a sentence of years the criminal would be forced to go in for treatment based upon the severity of the crime and the severity of the mental disease. Doctors would determine what kind of treatment is best for the mentally ill and then send him to a rehabilitation program. Once the person gets better, a committee would approve the release of the patient to ambulatory care, which would be mandatory for every person released. This is mental ill probation and visits would be on the physician's recommendation. A main factor of this solution is if the patient’s well-being started to deteriorate, he would be readmitted to become stable. This solution is low in cost because it would utilize facilities already in place and if we can keep the mentally ill on their medication, the rate of recidivism would drop. The law says if a person wants to remain ill, they have that right because they can refuse treatment. This new idea, which has been proven in Europe, takes away that right, forcing them on their medication and allows them to remain
