"...a direct reflection of the lack of adequate beds and coordination between the criminal justice and mental health systems.”

Not a very encouraging article from today's New York Times about the situation in Florida of some criminals with mental illlnesses.

In Miami, an average of 25 to 40 acutely psychotic people live in a unit of the main county jail that a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, Jennifer Daskal, described as squalid after visiting last month. Seventeen such inmates are currently waiting for state hospital beds, said Valerie Jonas, a county public defender, adding that the number has been as high as 30 in recent weeks.

Ms. Daskal said that some of the unit’s 14 “suicide cells” — dim, bare and designed for one inmate — were holding two or three at a time, and that the inmates were kept in their cells 24 hours a day except to shower. None of the mentally ill inmates receive group or individual therapy, she said in an affidavit.

Officials with the Department of Children and Families have argued that the agency cannot be held in contempt when it simply has no more beds, and that it could not have anticipated this year’s sharp rise in commitments. In June 2005, they said, only 125 inmates were waiting for hospital beds, of which 38 percent had waited longer than 15 days.

The problem is two-fold: lack of hospital beds, and luck of funding. Space and money - it always seems to come down to that, isn't it? Tragic. This problem is not unique to Florida, and that's the greater tragedy. Ronald Honberg, the legal director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, believes it to be a "national problem," and he is right, of course.

NAMI has the latest information on Congressional decisions about mental illness research and programs. NAMI also lets you know what you can do.

It appears that one prison resorted to torturing a mentally ill inmate, resulting in death.