The correctional system serves many individuals with mental and substance use disorders. In 1992, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and Public Citizen's Health Research Group released a report entitled Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill: The Abuse of Jails as Mental Hospitals. The report "revealed alarmingly high numbers of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other severe mental illnesses incarcerated in jails across the country. Most of these people had not committed major crimes, but either had been charged with misdemeanors or minor felonies directly related to the symptoms of their untreated mental illnesses, or had been charged with no crimes at all." (NAMI, 2004)
In June 2002, The Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project Report was released. (Council of State Governments, 2002) This report resulted from a two-year national effort to prepare specific recommendations that local, state, and federal policymakers and criminal justice and mental health professionals can use to improve the criminal justice system's response to people with mental illness. The report noted that in the ten years since the NAMI report had been released little had changed with regard to the treatment of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system. Statistics reported by the Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project are alarming. The incidence of serious mental illness among the ten million people who are booked into U.S. jails each year is three to four times higher than the rate of five percent found in the general population. The Project also reported that incarcerated people with mental illness receive little if any treatment for their illness, and that often the conditions of incarceration exacerbate their symptoms, frequently lengthening their jail terms. While the Consensus Project discusses mental health disorders only, the National GAINS Center for People with Co-Occurring Disorders in the Justice System, in a recent monograph, reported on statistics suggesting that about 700,000 of the ten million adults who are booked into U.S. jails each year have mental disorders (significantly lower than the estimate by the Consensus Project, but certainly still troubling). Seventy-five percent of those 700,000 individuals have co-occurring substance abuse disorders. (Courage to Change, 1999)
Advocates utilizes its many years of expert crisis assessment, intervention, and psychiatric treatment teams to offer a comprehensive mental health program for the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction. Our team social workers, psychiatrists, nurses and psychologists provide comprehensive services for the 1,300+ inmates at the facility. Services include but are not limited to mental health screening; mental health services; psychopharmacological services; crisis intervention; and forensic evaluation.
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Supporting you, your loved ones, your friends, Your neighbors...
Advocates provides support services for people with:
- Mental illness or co-occurring mental illness and substance abuse
- Intellectual or developmental disabilities or co-occurring mental illness and developmental disability
- Prader-Willi Syndrome
- Autism and pervasive developmental disabilities
- Acquired or traumatic brain injury
We also provide support services for:
- Deaf adults with mental illness or a developmental disability
- Families who are supporting a family member with a disability
- Elders living in the community who may have a mental illness or substance abuse disorder
- Adults with a mental health diagnosis in jail or re-entering the community
- Youth in transition from foster care
- Individuals and families who are homeless or at risk for homelessness
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