Anyone that follows politics in the United States knows that this fall has been heavy on political news. As of the past few weeks, the issue on the forefront has been the bailout.
While this issue has been analyzed in almost every imaginable way, another piece of legislation was passed by the Senate on October 1, and was able to float under the radar. This was the article put forward, to the President, by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Sen. Peter Domenici (R-NM), and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), titled "Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Reauthorization Act S.2304".
What this bill covers is $50 million in grants to local and state governments to create and expand treatment programs and mental health courts to aid criminal offenders that may have a mental health disorder. What the President now must do is sign off on this seemingly small, but very important piece of legislation.
For too many years, people that have mental health disorders have been filed into criminal logs and cases for crimes that they may have not had the capacity of truly understanding. This bill is what needs to be done to correct this problem. While it may seem fair to those looking in from the outside to see a criminal tried and found guilty, to those on the inside it is a gross injustice. Here in America, we are in the land of hope and opportunity. Who are we to strip that hope and opportunity from those that need it most?
While this is a tough issue - due to the fact that there is so much gray - we must look at this issue from a moral perspective. Is it fair that people can be charged with crimes that they may not have the capability of understanding? There are some cases in which an individual, no matter whether they have a mental health disorder or not, should be kept locked up. One only has to look at Charles Manson for such a case.
As easy as it is to argue this matter both ways, I have to believe that you cannot hold a person up to the normal standards of the law if they have a mental health disorder. In the United States' legal system, we find murderers and robbers to be innocent of a charge with the plea of insanity. Therefore, the same must be true of those who suffer from a mental health disorder that hinders their thought processes.
There can be many causes for a mental health disorder. Two specific causes that I will outline are a result of a biological defect or a psychological or mental health disorder brought on as a result of the way that an individual was brought up.
Take the latter. Say a kid grows up in a fractured home. Maybe somebody he knows is a drug-addict or alcoholic. As a kid, you are heavily influenced by those around you and this kid may pick up some of these bad habits. As this person grows, the only life that they may know is their addiction and the little, if any, love that they grew up with. Maybe this family was poor and had to steal for food to stay alive. Maybe this kid was psychologically and mentally scarred from growing up in this manner.
As this kid grows up, maybe he steals food. As an adult, he is charged with robbery at some point. While it is true that he did something wrong, just throwing him in jail is not the answer. While there must be some form of punishment, it should also be apparent that this person needs help in some form - maybe a counselor. That way, instead of having an offender bitterly waiting for his release and learning nothing, you will have an individual who knows what he did wrong and get him to work out his demons in an efficient manner. This applies only if the individual was psychologically scarred by the way they he grew up. If the kid was not scarred by how he grew up, then he deserves to go through the criminal justice system like any other common criminal.
If a person has a mental health disorder like depression, the answer is not to lock them up as another criminal who wants to hurt people. We are brought up being taught to help each other through the good and the bad. Let us help people through their problems instead of locking them up so that we don't have to deal with them. Ignorance can only be bliss for so long before it comes back and hurts you.
We need to be here for people. They are no different than we are aside from the fact that they must overcome a few more obstacles than we do. With this bill, our Government is stepping in the right direction in making sure that we treat all human beings as equals.
Matt Kushi is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at mkushi@student.umass.edu.
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