Released prisoners need schooling, jobs, housing, drug rehab, and mentors. This is the answer I have been saying since May 1998. It works, but it is rarely implemented. Why? Too many people will lose their jobs and thereby ruin the economy? Hanging is too good for them? Show no mercy? They have been tried, and they do not work. You would have to kill everybody to make them work. I’m suggesting a better answer.
It is a little bit more difficult to express the needs of those with mental illness. Their problems are genetic as shown by Deborah L. Levy, Ph.D., director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital, the largest psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Jail is not the place where we are going to find the answers for them although the three largest providers of mental health care in America are jails according to Alisa Roth who is a journalist and author of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.
Let us get started. The John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity in New York City has already begun, and I do make recommendations to them from time to time.
David Geiger is a licensed and awarded electrical engineer who spent 7 years in psychiatric hospitals and over 40 years since 1979 in the courts as a result of his schizophrenia.