Blogging on the mentally ill and their incarceration rates in U.S. prisons the blogger for A Bird and a Bottle writes:
It’s appalling to me that we treat mentally ill men and women who offend as badly as others who are incarcerated. We have set the bar for legal insanity so high that very few people can meet it, despite serious and often debilitating mental illness. Isolating mentally ill men and women takes this cruelty one large step further — not only will we incarcerate mentally ill men and women, but we will now also isolate them, placing them in situations that exacerbate their illnesses. Solitary (which, by the way, is the norm in Supermax facilities) is inhumane for anyone; when foisted on the mentally ill and suicidal, it is unimaginably twisted.
The Blog and the Bullet 