The Miami Herald has an interesting article about one recently released inmate who spent nearly his entire three year term in solitary. Worse yet, he had mental illnesses that were exacerbated by solitary.
In Abnormal Psychology we were discussing the effects of deinstitutionalization and the shift to community care, but the lack of community care shifting mental illness to the streets. Another big location that people with mental illness wind up is prison. The article makes the point that community mental health services are underfunded and lacking. We see the cost here.
Devon Davis was one of more than 2,000 North Carolina inmates released each year after being imprisoned with a mental illness. He is one of hundreds released directly from solitary confinement within a state prison. They emerge from a cell roughly the size of a parking space into a world they sometimes know little about.
