Prisons Lacking Mental Health Treatment

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, left, talks with former Solicitor General Ted Olson before President Bush delivers a speech on terrorism in the East Room of the White House in Washington Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006. Olson's wife Barbara Olson was a passenger on American Airlines flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon in the attacks of Sept. 11. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Gerald Herbert - AP)

"Every inmate in Pennsylvania gets a psychological profile," Beard said. "Our numbers on based on clinicians seeing everybody."

Fred Osher, health service policy director in the criminal justice program of the Council of State Governments, noted that previous studies that focused on those diagnosed as mentally ill found fewer troubled inmates _ closer to 20 percent.

The statistics bureau conducted interviews with samples of state, federal and jail inmates based on diagnostic questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, which is used by mental health professionals.

Inmates were asked if they had a history of mental health treatment or had symptoms of major depression, mania or psychotic disorders in the previous year. State and federal prisoners were interviewed in 2004; jail inmates in 2002.

"This method shows what the high end of the problems might be," Osher said. The federal study did not look at clusters of symptoms over time or evidence of disability, important factors in deciding who requires treatment, Osher said.

So the difference between those with symptoms and those getting treatment may not be evidence of "how underserved people are in prisons, but a reflection of an increase in good screening in recent years to see that those who need treatment get it," Osher said.

Beard said Pennsylvania's prison system runs a mental health system with special needs units to separate those with low level mental illness from inmates who might harm them; licensed inpatient units for treatment of more seriously ill inmates; and a forensic hospital for treatment of the most chronic and seriously mentally ill prisoners.

"I feel comfortable we are dealing with the mentally ill coming into our system," Beard said.