Status Updates From The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two M...

Just finished Ch 8 & OMG: how rotten & inhumane our judicial system & industrial prison complexes are…innocent until proven guilty my butt. How cruel we can be to one another.

The most important things Vince wanted the book to say:

Prison is torture
Sexual abuse changes you forever
We are all at the mercy of our brains
Listening is healing

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. A full 25% of the world's incarcerated population is within our prison walls. And over of third (37%) of that population has a history of mental illness.

Ive been asking myself why justice and medicine were often so far apart.

Maybe the solution was to heal crime.

It would require widespread, sweeping change in the way we understand medicine, crime, and rehabilitation. It would demand of us to think very differently about the health of communities, and the propping up of those who are just surviving.

What did "reverence for life" mean for people like this? True reverence extended compassion to the hopeless, the destitute, the scorned. It included the sick and the healthy, the poor and the rich, the free and the imprisoned. It included addicts and thieves, murderers and the men they killed. Reverence for life is unconditional. (Albert Schweitzer)

I remembered all the men Vince had told me about, there in prison with him. The boy in his twenties who heard voices at night. The middle aged man who spoke about his imaginary friend like he was a real person. The man in his sixties whose dementia was so bad he didn't remember, day to day, that he was in prison.

It became all too obvious to me that there were tens of thousands of people inside Virginia's prisons who needed psychiatric help. A 2014 report ...found that the number of mentally ill people in jail and prison in Virginia had risen 30% since 2008, and that the state jails held three times as many mentally ill people as its hospitals.

Vince and his illness cannot be treated in the prison system because our prisons have failed.

For decades they have treated the mentally ill as statistics. We have to treat them as patients. That means that first, we have to do them no harm.