Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Cook County Jail as the nation's largest mental health provider

This is a fascinating article about Cook County Jail, the nation's largest single-site jail, located in Chicago at 26th and California streets.  According to the article, a large proportion (estimated at one third) of the inmates have mental health needs, and in light of this the jail is run in many ways as a mental health facility.  It's a sorry state of affairs when a county sheriff is one of the nation's lead progressive thinkers on mental health care, though I'm glad he is such an advocate.  Also striking was this quote, "In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Estelle v. Gamble that prisons are constitutionally required to provide adequate medical care to inmates in their custody. As a result, prisoners are the only group of Americans with a constitutional right to health care".

No comments:

Post a Comment