Like Paris, Thousands of Other Mentally Disordered Women Stare at Jail Ceilings

This was amply documented in a comprehensive study of the treatment of mentally ill women in prison a decade ago by a team of Northwestern University medical and psychologists. The researchers found that thousands of women prisoners suffer astronomical rates of depression, and their rate is four times higher than that of male prisoners. In far too many cases, their illness goes undetected. That’s not due solely to the chronic shortage of funds, trained medical personnel, and treatment facilities for mentally challenged female prisoners. It also has to due with class and race bias.

A white woman, who’s a high school graduate, with a documented history of mental illness such as schizophrenia or depression, and is a first time offender, was eighty times more likely to receive care and treatment. In many cases, they had family, a private physician, and an attorney to lobby jail officials for specialized treatment. Jail officials made a greater effort to make sure they got it right when it came to treatment for these individuals. Any decision they make on treatment was much more likely to be scrutinized by their family members, doctors, and attorneys. The last thing they wanted was to be called on the carpet for a medical screw-up in their cases, or slapped with a liability lawsuit.

That was pretty much the excuse that L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca gave to fend off the storm of public criticism over Hilton’s special treatment. He insisted that he met with doctors, reviewed medical documents, and tests that purportedly proved that Hilton was in bad mental straights and needed the specialized care that she got.
The type or even availability of medical services for poor black, or Latino women is the exact reverse of that for white women. This is especially true if they have multiple arrests and jailings and have a history of drug use. If they suffer from a severe mental impairment such as schizophrenia or a manic disorder, jail officials and medical personnel are more likely to minimize or even ignore their problem. They simply chalk their mental impairment up to drug use or withdrawal symptoms.

Though the Northwestern study on the condition of mentally impaired women in jail is a decade old, there is little evidence that things have gotten any better, and much evidence that things have worsened. At the time of the study there were 50,000 women in America’s jails and prisons. According to the Sentencing Project, the Washington, D.C. based criminal justice system reform group, the number of women behind bars has doubled in the past decade. In fact, women are being jailed at a faster rate than men.

The sheer number of women jailed and the escalating cutbacks in state and federal funds to improve and expand jail and neighborhood community mental health services have increased the crisis of the jailed mentally impaired. They make up a significant number of the estimated quarter million prisoners that suffer mental disorders who are warehoused in the nation’s jails.

For a relatively brief moment, Hilton’s fame, name and wealth shielded her from the neglect and abuse that many mentally challenged women prisoners routinely get. But it did not spare her the agony of staring at a ceiling in America’s jails in a medical ward just like thousands of other mentally impaired women do.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.