His first few months there, he lived in general population. Nevertheless, after he accepted a plea bargain, Rodriguez was transferred to prison. His mother said the second psychiatric hospitalization was the last time she saw him lucid. He spent five years in jail before he took the plea bargain people with mental illness often spend far longer in jail waiting for their cases to be resolved.ĭuring his time in jail, he was sick enough that he had to be hospitalized three separate times – twice for psychiatric crises and once because he was so psychotic that he mutilated his genitals. Rodriguez is currently serving a 10-year sentence in a Florida state prison for trying to rob somebody at gunpoint when he was 22. The next few years were a blur of doctors appointments, drug use, homelessness, arrests and voluntary and involuntary hospitalizations. It was the first of perhaps a dozen times that she had him “Baker Acted”, as it is known in Florida – after the 1971 law governing involuntary hospitalizations. But when he continued to act strangely, saying he was hearing voices, Pena called the police and had him hospitalized against his will. His mother, Gemma Pena, had come home from work one night to find that he had disconnected the hot water heater, convinced that the CIA was using it to spy on him.Īt first she thought his behavior was simply evidence of grief over his grandmother’s death a few months earlier Rodriguez had been especially close to her. An urgent expos? of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.A tall, strapping boy whose friends called him Dino, as in “dinosaur”, Rodriguez was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was around 14. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.

She also surveys a range of efforts to address the problem, making the case for a large-scale overhaul of mental health care and criminal justice. Investigating police departments, courts, jails, and emergency health care facilities across the country, Roth provides the first nationwide account of this mental health crisis-and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She introduces us to ordinary people whose untreated mental illnesses drive them repeatedly into the justice system-and in some cases, to their deaths.

She takes readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County Jail to the women's prisons of Oklahoma, which have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America's tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.

Insane by alisa roth