posted 08-30-2002 03:01 PM               

http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol33l1/page02.htm

Excerpts from article:

The figures show that 144 inmates a day—roughly 52,000 per year—are being added to our prisons and jails. The number of adult citizens in the system recently surpassed the two million mark. The majority of them—nearly 60 percent nationwide—are repeat offenders; in fact, increased recidivism accounts for the majority of the population growth, jumping by more than 54 percent in state prisons in the last decade alone.

Medicate vs rehabilitate:

Rehabilitation is increasingly being replaced by the one modality that permeates contemporary psychiatry—medication. Estimates report 30 percent or more of inmates are on psychotropic drugs.

The prison population began to rocket in 1973, according to Patrick Langan, senior statistician for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and it hasn’t stopped. “To sustain that level of growth,” he told Freedom, “we are building the equivalent of a 1,000-bed prison in the United States every week.”

Some have singled out the nation’s drug laws as the cause of the problem and lobby to lighten penalties, particularly mandatory sentencing for personal drug possession and use. However, as Langan points out, the tougher drug and sentencing laws are a later development—enacted in the 1980s—and are not the explanation.

The accelerated decline of the correctional system’s rehabilitation function, today’s prevalence of drugs and the ballooning numbers of those behind bars can be traced in large measure to a “solution” to crime devised in the middle of the 20th century.

Until that time, a crime was a crime, and a more clear-cut concept existed of right and wrong.

But in 1945, prominent psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm articulated a new, little-known objective that would have a profound effect on corrections and, indeed, on the entire criminal justice system. The goal, in Chisholm’s words: “The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong... If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”2

Working through such bodies as the World Health Organization (WHO), formed in 1948, the World Federation for Mental Health, and the American Psychiatric Association, Chisholm and his associates spearheaded efforts to redefine crime as a mental illness, instead of a violation of agreed-upon legal standards and ethical and moral behavior.

Although the changes did not happen overnight, their cumulative effects have been profound.

The aim of treating crime as a mental illness achieved a breakthrough in 1954, when a U.S. Court of Appeals decision overturned the criminal conviction of a man for housebreaking on the reasoning that “an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of a mental disease or defect.”

In ensuing years, more violent criminals and even murderers came to be found guiltless by reason of insanity and placed in the custody of psychiatrists who often, after failing to rehabilitate them, turned them loose upon society. The ranks of those released have included Edmund Kemper, freed by psychiatrists five years after admitting he killed his grandparents; within several years, he went on to murder eight more people, including his mother.

Despite the failures of psychiatrically based programs, little has been done to establish or to maintain alternate, workable solutions, letting them perish by the roadside along with the ethical and moral values inherent in the “penitentiary” concept. Ultimately, more and more treatment programs have contracted into the one modality that defines contemporary psychiatry—“medication.”

Meanwhile, psychiatrists instilled a mindset among the nation’s educational institutions by indoctrinating them to be alert for children exhibiting signs of “potential delinquency” and to refer them for treatment. Such children are then segregated with labels such as “conduct disorder,” “oppositional defiance disorder” or any number of other labels and treated with drugs in their schools or carted off to school-based health clinics or community mental health centers. These centers also treat members of the community at large and provide almost all of the mental health services for adult and juvenile offenders.

More recently, “jail diversion” programs established in the 1990s have allowed courts to refer people charged with minor crimes to outpatient mental health treatment. “Conflict resolution” classes and “anger management” programs, which claim as their purpose the prevention of crime, are entrenched in today’s schools.

Also in recent years, at least partially in response to the “super-predator”4 theory of youth violence, trends emerged within the justice system to prosecute children and teenagers as adults, to discard rehabilitation in favor of punishment, and to treat offenders more like animals than humans.