Just last week, I attended the University Libraries Lecture Series at BGSU with the author, Piper Kerman, on her book, Orange the New Black. In this talk, my eyes were opened to how the criminal system works and what she learned from it. It’s surprising how messed up our way of fixing the crime problem is.

In the speech, she discussed how a majority of the woman that she was incarcerated with suffered some traumatic event before committing the crime that led them in jail. She brought up the thought that if these women could’ve been given counseling or offered services to help them cope with the incident in which they were a victim, they could’ve gotten better and not fallen into crime. Another thing I learned was that 40% of the people in jail have mental disorders. This fact brings up the question of why aren’t they in a hospital or in therapy instead? Why are these people being put in jail if what they really need is rehabilitation or counseling? Kerman also stated that mental health treatments, such as therapy and rehabilitation, work, but they aren’t accessible in jail. Overall the speech demonstrated what really needs to be done to solve this incarceration problem. It’s not jail. It’s health services. The number of people in jail with mental disorders, mood/trauma/anxiety disorders, or have been affected by addiction or trauma is overwhelming. These kind of problems aren’t going to be solved by locking up the people who have these mental health issues. These mental health issues can only be solved by increasing health services, so they reach out to these people before they even commit the crime.

Learning these three things makes me look at criminals, those incarcerated, differently. I always thought of criminals or wrongdoers as people who made a bad choice. Sure, that is still true, but there is much more to it than that. There is a lot going on before a person commits the crime, and that was a really interesting thing to learn about. This speech also makes me wonder what should be done instead and why it isn’t happening. In an article on Kaiser Healthy News, Sarah Varney states the horrible reality saying, “Psychological disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder and trauma-related disorders, are rampant among inmates, and mental illness itself is a risk factor for landing in jail.” It’s crazy to think that having a mental disorder, traumatic experience or addiction would be treated like this, but it is. But how can we do anything about it? We can spread the word. We can get the word out, so change does happen. We can also change our perspective on the people who are incarcerated. There is so much more that happened before they were incarcerated that we don’t see.

References

Varney, S. (2014, May 15). By the numbers: Mental illness behind bars. Retrieved November 6, 2016, from http://khn.org/news/by-the-numbers-mental-illness-...