Commentaries

I work in a building filled with statues and monuments. There are statues of famous people who have touched our lives by the way they led their own. There are windows that remind us of events in our history, ancient and modern. There are plaques dedicated to loved ones who died serving our country or who died as children, dedicated to those who generously gave of themselves and should be remembered. 

I think we are asking the wrong question.  When we hear the horrifying reports of the killings of black men and attacks on police officers, we want to know who to blame.  There has to be someone at fault.  But the deeper question is, why do we make decisions in our society based on fear.  Because fear changes us, it makes normally good people make very bad choices, and it creates an atmosphere where everyone is a potential enemy.  

Prisons, America’s ‘new asylums’

A new report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill, found that the number of individuals with serious mental illness in prisons and jails now exceeds the number in state psychiatric hospitals by a factor of ten.
In 2012, there were more than 356,000 inmates with severe mental illness in prisons and jails nationwide. There were only 35,000 mentally ill individuals in state psychiatric hospitals.