Hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the United States are mentally ill, and the percentage of prisoners with some form of psychiatric malady is growing, Roth reports. Her new book, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, is an exposé of the warehousing of the mentally ill in prisons and jails under conditions that squash chances for recovery. Roth soon set out to unravel the complex interplay between corrections facilities and the nation’s patchwork and largely inadequate mental health system. Increasingly, prisons and jails were turning into warehouses for the mentally ill.

Roth’s reporting began at a time when politicians, public-interest lawyers, and others had begun to raise questions about the nation’s burgeoning prison population and the penal codes that swept into prison a generation of young nonviolent offenders who in years past would have received shorter sentences or no prison time at all.Īnd with that came another issue. In some ways the timing couldn’t have been better. When she returned to the United States, she took on what was arguably an even more difficult and heart-wrenching story-the nation’s sprawling criminal justice system. She later reported on the Iraqi and Syrian refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe. From her base in Berlin, she covered the growing tensions over immigration all over Europe for outlets including NPR and CBS Radio. In 1999, Roth received a Fulbright fellowship to study immigration and asylum policy in Germany. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.Ever since Alisa Roth ’95 launched her journalism career, she’s made it a point to take on tough assignments. She also surveys a range of efforts to address the problem, making the case for a large-scale overhaul of mental health care and criminal justice. Investigating police departments, courts, jails, and emergency health care facilities across the country, Roth provides the first nationwide account of this mental health crisis-and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She introduces us to ordinary people whose untreated mental illnesses drive them repeatedly into the justice system-and in some cases, to their deaths.

She takes readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County Jail to the women’s prisons of Oklahoma, which have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America’s tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.

Insane by alisa roth