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Frequency of mentally ill youth in juvie detention twice as high as previously believed

America has reached the point, sadly, where we treat prisons, jails and youth detention as substitutes for mental health treatment or else the only place where indigent people can access mental health care.For adults the issues can be more complex, but for kids they're pretty simple: Criminalizing mental health problems only makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective (to get the person access to treatment), not from any viable theory of justice anyone could possibly describe.Last week the Houston Chronicle's Sarah Viren published some astonishing data ("Survey of youth in custody find half have mental health problems," May 8):Nearly half of the youths locked up in the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center suffer from mental health problems ? far more than the estimated 20 percent with mental disorders in the general youth population ? figures released Thursday show...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on May 14, 2008 (boomark / email).