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The Perspectives series, featuring insightful commentary from members of the community, is heard on KQED public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It's a madhouse out there. What are we going to do with the insane and mentally infirm? Because of the perceived increase in stalking, obsessional, delusional and psychotic behavior, prosecutors and judges are attempting to head off crimes by jailing those who appear mad enough to commit them.
But the judicial crystal ball is a cloudy one at best. The lunatic fringe is no longer the fringe; it is the whole damn buggy in some cases. Many criminal court judges have become psychiatrists of last resort - imposing psychotherapy, anger management, anti-violence counseling, and psycho-tropic medications on convicts instead of, or in addition to, jail.
At first blush, this may seem humane - treating the psychologically wounded as sick people. But there are subtle and scary side effects to this prescription. What about the marginally or harmless insane, the mildly odd people, the aimless vocalizers who scream, yell, blush or laugh hysterically and frighten people. They don't belong in the criminal justice system at all unless they commit a crime. But that's generally where they are, clogging the courts with their ruminations and ranting. We need a madness management court staffed by legally trained psychologists, rather than judges with little or no psychological expertise. Anger is not a crime. It is a pervasive and often sane response to an unjust insensitive, and insane world.
In the old USSR, the dissident was locked up in a psychiatric hospital and force-fed anti-psychotic drugs. Now, we are going in that direction. Psychiatric detention gives our government the power to purify our thoughts, lobotomize our dissidents, and curb even our unrealized impulses. That is madness. With a perspective, this is Robert Kroll.
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