The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found that 11 million people a year are admitted to US jails; of them, 15 percent of men and 30 percent of women have a serious mental illness.14 The largest inpatient psychiatric facilities in the United States are the LA County Jail, New York’s Rikers Island Jail, and Chicago’s Cook County Jail; the PMI in jails and prisons outnumber those in state hospitals ten to one.15 The number-two cause of death in jails and prisons is suicide; jails, which generally receive people straight from police custody, provide only limited screening and inconsistent mental health care.16 NAMI estimates that 83 percent of PMI in jail don’t have access to the treatments they need.17 People are often given medication while in jail and, at best, a bottle of pills and a referral when they are released, leading to a revolving door of arrests and short-term incarceration with no real improvement in the person’s underlying mental health, which is often at the root of the behaviors that get them arrested in the first place.

The criminalization of homeless people also violates the International Covenant Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,18 which states that all people have a right to housing, that governments have an obligation to put the wellbeing of people above concerns about disorder and aesthetics, and that homelessness exerts a tremendous cost on those subjected to it. Criminalization efforts exacerbate that cost without housing any more people.