Solve a contemporary social and criminal justice issue Thesis

Solve a contemporary social and criminal justice issue - Thesis Example While this system has been designed to facilitate a more peaceful and non-violent society, there are challenges with criminal justice in providing rehabilitation for criminal offenders sustaining mental illness problems. There have been dramatic increases in the prevalence of mental illness among the prison population in the United States. In 1996, 25 percent of all individuals incarcerated in jails reported that they had sought treatment for a mental illness condition at some point in their lives, representative of approximately 127,000 jail inmates throughout the nation (Whitehead, Jones and Braswell, 2003). In the 1970s, there was a push to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill within psychiatric hospitals and, instead, to provide the mentally ill with community treatment programs. It was determined during this time period in history that such treatment programs would provide a superior public safety outcome, allow jails to operate more efficiently by removing challenges of rehabilitating mentally ill criminal offenders, and provide the mentally ill with more productive treatment methods that jails are unable to provide (Whitehead, et al.). However, this approach at deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill has not been effective. In 2002, it is estimated that a substantial 64 percent of all jailed inmates in the country suffered from a mental health issue (Whitehead, et al.). Community mental health services are designed to provide encouragement and treatment for people suffering from an array of mental disorders in a domiciliary environment rather than in psychiatric clinics. Such community mental health systems provide appropriate outpatient psychiatric services in an age where social perspectives on mental illness have transformed care from intensive psychotherapy to treatment ideology where the mentally ill have a positive place to live with encouraging social environments that