News and Commentary Archive

Explore recent scientific discoveries and news as well as CLBB events, commentary, and press.

Mission

The Center for Law, Brain & Behavior puts the most accurate and actionable neuroscience in the hands of judges, lawyers, policymakers and journalists—people who shape the standards and practices of our legal system and affect its impact on people’s lives. We work to make the legal system more effective and more just for all those affected by the law.

In US Prisons, Psychiatric Disability Is Often Met by Brute Force

By Kanya D’Almeida | Truthout | July 18, 2015

They called it the “shoe leather treatment” because that was exactly what it was: 10 or 11 guards, sometimes more, would form a circle around the patient and kick him unconscious. Then they’d drag him across the room, strip him naked and throw him in a tiny room with just one window to allow in the snow, and leave him there to freeze.

That was in 1961 in Pennsylvania’s Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Twenty years later, the routine abuse that took place there became the subject of a memoir by Bill Thomas who survived 10 years in that institution before breaking out and eventually testifying before a Special State Senate Committee Inquiry on the practices of administrators, guards and even doctors at Farview State Hospital.

The facility has since been closed down, as were thousands of others like it during the wave of “deinstitutionalization” in the 1960s and ’70s. Some state mental hospitals remain, but they are much less prevalent than they once were.

However, the shoe leather treatment lives on in jails and prisons around the country, which have become surrogate institutions for people with mental illnesses and where violence, neglect and abuse of prisoners labeled with psychiatric disabilities is on the rise.

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Mental Illness and Society: Prisons, Rehabilitation, and Prevention

By Gene Beresin and Steve Schlozman | September 18, 2013 | from PBS’s “Brains On Trial” Science Blog

Over the last 25 years, funding for mental health services in communities, juvenile detention centers, and in prisons has been cut back dramatically. Criminal behavior without question costs more to society than does treating psychiatric illness. Mental health treatment is effective and essential to a sane and modern society, and yet there is deplorable lack of funding or access to these services for huge swaths of our juvenile population.

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