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The Madness of American Incarceration
by Christine Montross
Book Reviewed by:Galvanized by her work in our nation's jails, psychiatrist Christine Montross illuminates the human cost of mass incarceration and mental illness
Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. Several years ago, she set out to investigate why so many of her patients got caught up in the legal system when discharged from her care--and what happened to them therein.
Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American incarceration. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones.
The stark world of American prisons is shocking for all who enter it. But Dr. Montross's expertise--the mind in crisis--allowed her to reckon with the human stories behind the bars. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. In these encounters, Montross finds that while our system of correction routinely makes people with mental illness worse, just as routinely it renders mentally stable people psychiatrically unwell. The system is quite literally maddening.
Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.
The concerns Dr Montross expresses in Waiting for an Echo are exceedingly relevant to the present moment in which many Americans are reevaluating the role of police in society and the inequity inherent in the justice system (as well as the appalling lack of concern for health and safety within many prisons). She puts a human face on the suffering of mentally ill people who are incarcerated and makes a compelling argument for compassion and change on their behalf...continued
Full Review
(806 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Since its opening in 2010, Halden Prison, located in Norway's Østfold region, has been held by many who believe in the necessity of prison reform to be a model institution due to its humane treatment of inmates and emphasis on rehabilitation. In Waiting for an Echo, Dr. Christine Montross visits Halden for a tour and contrasts the facility with the detention centers she has investigated in the United States.
Staff at Halden operate under a system referred to as "dynamic security," in which guards circulate around the prison interacting and developing relationships with inmates rather than surveilling from a fixed location. In Waiting for an Echo, Montross is shown a "seclusion room" by the prison's governor Are Høidal that...
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David C. Fathi, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project
An uncommonly beautiful writer, Dr. Christine Montross brings a scientist's rigor and a clinician's compassion to her examination of the profoundly broken U.S. incarceration system. Waiting for an Echo lays bare the appalling human suffering that occurs every day in our prisons and jails—and points us toward a better way.
