Dart Calls Jails 'The New Insane Asylums'

By aaroncynic in News on Oct 1, 2013 7:35PM

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called jails and prisons “the new insane asylums” in an interview with 60 Minutes Sunday. Dart’s comments to the news magazine came just a few weeks after the inmate population at Cook County Jail began exceeding 10,000 on some days, a huge portion of which is made up of people who are mentally ill. “The irony is so deep that you have a society that finds it wrong to have people warehoused in state mental institutions but those very same people were OK if we warehouse them in a jail,” said the Sheriff.

According to the Huffington Post, Sheriff's Department spokesman Ben Breit said at least a quarter of the jail’s population is made up of people with mental disabilities. Dart gave 60 Minutes a rough count of between 2,500 and 2,800.

Dart’s comments reflect an exploding national problem. The Wall Street Journal reports the bunk space for America’s three largest jails—Cook County, Los Angeles County and New York City—have the equivalent of 28 percent of beds at the country’s 213 psychiatric hospitals. Esteban Gonzalez, president of the American Jail Association, said “In every city and state I have visited, the jails have become the de facto mental institutions.”

Many of the mentally ill inmates at Cook County and other jails around the country have high rates of recidivism because of a lack of services to properly treat the illnesses of prisoners. Sometimes, mentally ill inmates don’t even want to leave the jail. In a July interview with Think Progress, Dart said:

“When I go to the mental health unit, they’re saying, ‘Sheriff, can you help me get a place to stay when I get out of here, I have nowhere to go, no one will take me.’ It’s horrible.”

Dart also said that while the majority of mentally ill inmates are nonviolent, there are “connections” between the lack of services and mass shootings. “People are falling through the cracks all the time,” he said. “To think that won't then boil up at some point and end up in a tragedy—that's just naive.”