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 ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH: *Delaware's Institution of Choice for Mental Health Treatment = Prison*
 Mothers in Prison
 Position Statement on Offender Reentry
 Creating Effective Offender Re-entry Programs
 Community Corrections As A Safe Alternative to Incarceration
 Needs of Incarcerated Mothers and Their Children
 Opposition to the Death Penalty
 Abolition of all Mandatory Drug Sentencing Laws in Delaware
 Restoration of Voting Rights for Ex-Offenders
 Race and Incarceration: A Preliminary Consideration
 Mental Health and the Criminal Justice System: Opportunities for Change
 Improving Responses to People with Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System

ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH
Delaware's Institution of Choice for Mental Health Treatment = Prison

Excerpt from: Del Med J, January 2009, Vol 81 No 1
The United States incarcerates a larger proportion of its population than all other countries in the world. In 2001, the U.S. average was 699 persons per 100,000 population. Delaware is significantly above the national average with an incarceration rate of 895 persons per 100,000. “In many instances, incarceration is used (in Delaware) as a policy of first resort rather than the policy of last resort,” according to University of Delaware Professor Danilo Yanich, author of Ex-Offender Reentry in Delaware- A Preliminary Report of the Delaware Reentry Roundtable.

Physicians who have not followed the flow of mental health services over the past 30- plus years may not be aware that the advent of deinstitutionalization of mental health services beginning in the early 1970s occurred just prior to the advent of harsher sentences for drug use, possession, and sales, the so-called Rockefeller Laws. The psychiatric institutions that were downsized were mostly state owned and operated and originally provided services for the communities’ mentally ill. The wealthy mentally ill patient never did come into these institutions unless he was committed – adjudged to be “a danger to himself and others.”

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