Social Implication of Mental Disorder on the US Criminal Justice System - Research Paper Example

Running Head: Mental Disorders and Crime Social Implication of Mental Disorder on the U.S. Criminal Justice System A Research Paper Robert Miranda CRJ 308: Psychology of Criminal Behavior Prof. Jon Stern Date of Submission Introduction It is beyond doubt that the US criminal justice system works as a default mental institution system. A large number of individuals with mental disorders incarcerated in jails and prisons have committed no criminal act at all or simply a public order violation (Walker & Bohm, 2006): figures reveal that between 30 and 40 percent of people with mental disorder in the prisons of particular states had no offenses or criminal arraignments pending against them, whereas prisons report regularly holding mentally ill individuals merely because they have nowhere else to go (p. 59). Criminal imprisonment largely or solely because of mental disorder has an effect on children as well (Cole & Smith, 2007). The imprisonment of juveniles and adults with mental disorders in penal facilities is accompanied by an unusually sizeable cost to the US economy. The indirect costs comprise lost efficiency or output stemming from undertreated or untreated mental disorders and from imprisonment, as well as the lost efficiency of individuals, such as family members or other relatives, who give voluntary care for a mentally ill individual, while the direct costs comprise the costs of arrest through imprisonment and discharge (Parisi & Rowley, 2007). Legal scholars and economists have not tried to determine the sum of indirect and direct cost to the US economy of a criminal justice response to mental disorder (Streib, 2005). However, assuming that something is costly is not necessarily assuming about its value. Even a sizeable cost can be important if the gains or benefits are equally tremendous. According to classical economics, imprisonment costs can be regarded rational and net positive, if the benefit they generate in the form of public safety and crime prevention surpasses the costs (Parisi & Rowley, 2007). Still, a considerable fraction of the costs sustained as an outcome of the criminal justice response to mentally ill individuals generates no public safety or crime prevention gains (Walker & Bohm, 2006). General deterrence, or the belief that prospective criminals are discouraged from their planned criminal act when they see others have been imprisoned for committing a crime, and specific deterrence, or the dissuasion of a certain individual committing his/her planned criminal act, definitely cannot be encouraged by imprisoning individuals who have not perpetrated an offense (Reid, 2005). Likewise, public safety is not encouraged by incarcerating individuals who as non-offending or whose crimes of passion are nonviolent (Erickson & Erickson, 2008). This essay proposes that the great human and economic costs of the criminal justice response to mental disorder not merely are undisputed by intellectuals but are willingly upheld by voters and policymakers because of the established social implication of mental disorder. The New Chicago School of law and economics speculates that social implication, or which is “what an act, omission, or status means to a community of interpreters” (Parisi & Rowley, 2007, 40), constructs social value, which is a fundamental concept in the economic study of law. This essay argues that the social implications of mental disorder embedded in U.S. culture are the penalizing or moral framework, which is major, and the therapeutic or medical framework, which is secondary. Under the penalizing or moral framework, mental disorder is regarded as a failure of morality, not as a health condition that need and respond to healing or treatment. Social implication is constructed through a public order response to mental disorder for, under existing outlooks about mental disorder the punishment of mentally ill individuals is thought to strengthen the integral rule of individual morality (Bicchieri, 2005). Punishment of mentally ill individuals merges with people’s ideas about the appropriate function of the criminal justice system in penalizing blameworthy failures of morality and of penal facilities as the asylum for individuals who transgress not just the law but integral social values (Kring, Davison, Neale & Johnson, 2007). Support for this belief is extensive: the assumption that mental disorder should not be treated but punished as a failure to act responsibly, and that this action strengthens the rule of individual morality or accountability, is espoused by legal scholars, among actual and mock juries, in the statements and legislation of policymakers (Kring et al., 2007). The undesirability of hospital-based incarceration as a possible alternative punishment also bears witness to the dominance of the penalizing/moral framework over the medical model (Erickson & Erickson, 2008). Moreover, the difference between the criminal nature of mentally ill individual and the plea of ‘temporary insanity’ underlines the function that the particular social implication of mental disorder serves with regard to the rule of individual accountability (Cole & Smith, 2007). This justification is only valid for non-mentally ill individuals who violate the law as a consequence of particular ‘confrontational’ situations (Cole & Smith, 2007). This proves that the law forgives wrongs that are interpreted as moral but not those that are viewed as blameworthy, or plainly strange. Similar to mental disorder, the prison institution also has a certain social implication. A large body of research on the history of incarceration shows that prison not merely detains but represents society’s antipathy toward those who violate established norms, including the rule of individual accountability (Bicchieri, 2005). This implication of the prison aside from incarceration identifies utility constructed by the confinement even of non-offending and nonviolent mentally ill people— as long as mental disorder is treated under a penalizing/moral framework (Walker & Bohm, 2006). However, if mental disorder were treated under a therapeutic or medical framework, the convergence between the implication of prison and of mental disorder would vanish (Walker & Bohm, 2006). This would unfetter great human and economic value and demand the placement of mentally ill individuals in a different, hospital- or treatment-based system. Social Implication of Mental Disorder As aforementioned, this essay will justify that, because the prevailing social implications of mental disorder occur under a moral or penalizing framework, instead of a medical model, reform attempts at replacing imprisonment with therapy will fail. Freeing the great economic value that may stem from deviating from the moral/penalizing framework toward a hospital- or treatment-based framework will rely on a change in the social implications related with mental disorders (Streib, 2005). The ‘social meaning turn’ (Parisi & Rowley, 2007, 60) in legal research seeks to develop economic analysis to explain the actual, yet frequently unseen, social costs and gains that members of the community acquire from their actions. Instead of discarding economic analysis or asserting that a great deal of human behavior is not vulnerable to economic study since it is a component of the unquantifiable social or emotional domain, the New Chicago School studies the social implication of the practice under consideration, and the related social costs and gains of moving away from the norms associated to that practice (Parisi & Rowley, 2007). These social costs and gains afterward are developed into a more sound explanation of how a rational individual, functioning within a particular social setting, is likely to behave or act (Reid, 2005). Transgression of a norm incurs a cost as an outcome of the implications that other members of the community attribute to criminal behavior and the punishment evaluated therefore. As emphasized by Lessig, the cost “of deviating from a social norm… is a price, associated with a given action… [O]ne only understands that price by interpreting the action consistent with a norm, or the action deviating from this norm, in its context” (Bicchieri, 2005, 204). To assess the costs of deviation from the norm, or to identify what forces could be exerted to reform a norm, its social implication hence should be understood. Moving away from established social norms may compel an individual to sustain considerable social costs—hence, where the punishment for violating a law does not overshadow the social costs or gains of acting consistently with existing norms, the individual who is making the most of his/her long-term value within a given social setting should prefer to violate the law (Streib, 2005). On the other hand, a penalty or reward scheme that binds social implications under consideration in the practice that is its objective is more probable to acquire compliance, and may change the social implication of the practice itself (Parisi & Rowley, 2007). Since the criminal justice system strengthens social and personal obligation, and penalizes criminal behavior, social implications that identify the mentally ill as irresponsible could construct social meaning by strengthening the responsibility rule, at fairly negligible social cost, against impoverished outsiders (Cole & Smith, 2007). While incompetent on the surface, the criminal justice system hence becomes the ‘meaningfully’ sensible location for mentally ill individuals once appropriate social implications of mental disorders are considered (Reid, 2005). The direction toward replacing a criminal justice response with a public health response hence becomes apparent: programs to transfer the treatment of mentally ill individuals from the public order system to the medical system, and to move the social response from the penalizing to the therapeutic, will just be successful if they also alter the major social implication of mental disorder from a failure of responsibility to a therapeutic model (Walker & Bohm, 2006). Any attempt to replace punishment with treatment does not initially alter the social implications of mental disorder will disrespect the established social implications of individual morality that are controlled by the criminal justice system (Streib, 2005). As claimed by Kahan, legal policies and administrations that are rational in an economic way but that counteract a prevailing social implication about the practice under consideration will be ‘politically stillborn’ since the limitedly productive alternative has failed to justify the social implication, or the ‘task’, that the embedded administration carries out in sustaining particular social implications (Erickson & Erickson, 2008, 81). In reality, this has been the case. There are, in the past and nowadays, well-meant reform attempts intended to change the response to mentally ill individuals from penalizing to medical that have fallen through on social implication (Cole & Smith, 2007). On the contrary, legislative attempts that advocate the confinement of individuals with mental disorders, but in reality provide little or no benefits in public safety, though gain considerable support. Uses of Penal Facilities as Asylums for Mentally Ill Individuals As stated by Judge William Wayne Justice, “It is deplorable and outrageous that… prisons appear to have become a repository for a great number of mentally ill citizens. Persons who, with psychiatric care, could fit well into society, are instead locked away, to become wards of the state’s penal system. Then, in a tragically ironic twist, they may be confined in conditions that nurture, rather than abate, their psychoses” (Kring, Davison, Neale & Johnson, 2007, 592). Prisons have turned into a major mental health institution in the United States. The Los Angeles Country Jail, for instance, confines more or less 3,000 mentally ill individual per day, more than any mental health facility or state hospital in the United States (Cole & Smith, 2007, 345). Likewise, Rikers Island penal facilities in New York confines roughly 3,000 individuals with mental disorders per day, turning it into the “state’s largest psychiatric facility” (Cole & Smith, 2007, 345). The 2000 Census of state and federal prisons reveals that the “primary… or secondary function of over 150 prisons nationwide is ‘mental health confinement’” (Streib, 2005, 91). Through a combination of elevated chances of detention, re-detention, and arrest without charge or on false accusations, mentally ill individuals are considerably more probable than other individuals to spend time in prison without having perpetrated more criminal acts (Cole & Smith, 2007). As a Senate statement reveals, “up to 40 percent of adults who suffer from a serious mental illness will come into contact with the… criminal justice system at some point in their lives,” usually “unnecessarily” (Reid, 2005, 299).The pervasiveness of mentally ill individuals in criminal confinement, and the function that mental disorder itself serves in compelling children and adults to become incarcerated, has encouraged reform-oriented legislators to assume that (Reid, 2005, 299) “[w]e have basically made mental illness a crime in this country.” Conclusions To sum it up, there is a prevailing view of mental disorder as mirroring a failure of responsibility or morality. Mentally ill individuals are viewed, not equally but mostly, as manifesting a blameworthy failure to complement one’s actions to social norms. The relationship of mental disorder with social immorality makes it meaningfully rational to strengthen the moral norm by penalizing individuals with mental disorders. Most of these practices in corrective incarceration and symbolic legislation in fact have negligible effect of public safety and crime prevention. The focus on the representation of punishment, via criminal incarceration, over its real consequence is demonstrated by the undesirability of civil incarceration as another punishment. Independently, there may be an inclination for penalizing individuals with mental disorders, as expressed through the presence of long-standing excuse premises for offenders who do not have mental disorder, such as temporary insanity. Under the presently dominant social implication attributed to individuals with mental disorders, their punishment may generate social value through the strengthening of the norm of morality or responsibility. In this way, the fundamental rule of personal responsibility can be strengthened successfully through practices in representational politics influencing a fairly small and inarticulate social group. Similarly, so long as the social implications related with mental disorders occur under the penalizing or moral framework rather than of the therapeutic or medical model, evaluative verdict will place individuals with mental disorders in penal, rather than therapeutic, detention. References Bicchieri, C. (2005). The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cole, G.F. & Smith, C.E. (2007). Criminal Justice in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Erickson, P.E. & Erickson, S.K. (2008). Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict . New York: Rutgers University Press . Kring, A.M., Davison, G.C., Neale, J.M. & Johnson, S. (2007). Abnormal Psychology. J. Wiley. Parisi, F. & Rowley, C.K. (2007). The Origins of Law and Economics: Essays by the Founding Fathers. New York: Edward Elgar Pub. Reid, S. T. (2005). Criminal Justice. Cengage Learning. Streib, V. (Ed.). (2005). The State of Criminal Justice. Washington, DC: American Bar Association. Walker, J. & Bohm, R.M. (2006). Demystifying Crime and Criminal Justice . Michigan: Roxbury Publisher. Read More