Every year about one million people with serious mental health issues are arrested in America, many of them on misdemeanor charges. Once they are taken into custody research shows that individuals with serious mental illness are more likely to receive jail time than others arrested for the same crimes.
On this edition of UWM Today, we’re going to talk about the situation impacting not only people with mental illness, but members of our justice system who are looking for better ways of dealing with the problem.
Our guests are Amy Watson, a professor in UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare and Mary Madden, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southeast Wisconsin.
