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Jails are the new asylums for women

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Jails are the new asylums for women By Megan Cottrell 02.16.11 - Chicago Reporter If there's one thing that Rosemary Gido wants her students to know, it's this: "It's not rocket science. Jails and prisons are the new asylums," she says. As a professor of criminology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Gido has been studying how the criminal justice system treats two populations--women and the mentally ill--and how those two groups often overlap. The research she cites is pretty convincing. When you look at all the people in jails in the U.S., the Justice Policy Institute estimates that about 60 percent of them are mentally ill. In prisons, it's lower, but still, nearly half of the prison population is suffering from mental illness. How does that compare to the general population? In the regular population, about 10...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on February 18, 2011 (boomark / email).