The criminal justice systems needs to cut costs, and one of the main ways of doing that would be to decriminalize mental illness, according to the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York.
“For us to take resources – not just money, but brain power – and devise solutions to incarceration, especially for young people and the mentally ill, outside the criminal justice system,” Soffiyah Elijah, 57, said in an interview placed on the internet.
“If a response team of social workers could be brought to the scene, we could have much better outcomes. Having the involvement of knowledgeable social workers could cut down on deaths and allow police officers to deal with real crime. We need to decriminalize mental illness,” she said.
Elijah said the state should have mental health courts and provide facilities for those with mental illnesses.
“It costs about $56,000 a year to incarcerate someone. You could provide a whole lot of mental health services for a lot less than that. I’m not minimizing the fact the person may have done something dangerous or violent, but a person with mental illness is not best served in a prison setting.
“If we don’t get their mental illness resolved, the likelihood they will hurt someone else again is increased.
“We need a lot more doctors in the system, and caring doctors,” she said. “Medical and dental care should not be being filtered through the correctional officers, because withholding medical and dental treatment is a way for them (correctional officers) to retaliate against people who are incarcerated.”
Another problem within the New York prison system is rape and sexual abuse, especially in Attica, a maximum-security prison where most of the inmates are serving long sentences, she said.
“Sexual harassment and sexual abuse throughout prison is rampant, but Attica is particularly bad,” said Elijah. “Attica has the second-highest reported rate of staff sexual misconduct for male prisons in the nation. If you count women’s prisons, it’s third, as Bayview (a medium security women’s prison located in Chelsea, N.Y.) is second.”
In the past, Elijah urged state officials to shut down Attica, saying Attica prisoners could be moved to other facilities in New York. “Attica has a long, ugly history and that has never been cleared since (the famous riot in) 1971,” she said. “There were 8,000 empty prison beds last year and the governor closed 3,800, leaving 4,200.”
Elijah stated that New York is trying to lower prison costs by keeping more people from behind bars.
To help curb the growing number of young offenders, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg started a Young Men’s Initiative to help reduce the number of black and Latino men in prison.
“Any programs we can put in place to address the problems facing young people are a step in the right direction,” Elijah said. “We really need to break down the cycle of young people following their parents into prison.”
According to Elijah, about 80 percent of the people who are incarcerated in New York are reported to have a drug problem.
“Even if they’re not serving a drug-related offense, it underlies their crime, even if they are not always able to identify it as a reason; the robbery they committed was driven by a drug problem.” Some prostitutes offend because of a drug problem, she noted.
Elijah said decriminalizing all drug usage would also lower the cost of running the prison system. “It’s a slippery slope to start drawing divisions (between, say, marijuana and heroin) so decriminalize all drug usage and medicalize it instead.”
The likelihood prisoners will succeed when they get out is very low, she said. It is imperative that “we reeducate and change the mentality of the people working in prisons and society, and take a humane look at how to reform the criminal justice system,” she added.
“If we only look at the statistics and adopted a rational stance, we’d see the approach we’ve taken for centuries has failed,” concluded Elijah.
The group she heads monitors conditions in state prisons. She is the first woman and first person of color to head the 170-year-old organization.