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| FILE - In this June 4, 2013, file photo, James Holmes, who was convicted on all counts on July 16, 2015, in the 2012 mass murder at a Colorado movie theater, appears in court in Centennial, Colo. Despite having convicted Holmes in the killings, jurors must still determine whether to put Holmes on death row for opening fire in the crowded movie theater. But their rejection of the idea that he was legally insane at the time of the mass shooting ensures that at the very least, he will soon join the thousands of other mentally ill prisoners who receive treatment behind bars. |
DENVER (AP)
-- Whether James Holmes gets life without parole or a death sentence for
the Colorado theater shooting, he will spend years behind bars, joining
about 6,000 inmates in Colorado and hundreds of thousands of others
nationwide who suffer from mental illness.
Experts
say prisons are ill-equipped to treat the growing number of inmates
with mental illnesses - especially the majority who are not convicted of
crimes as violent as Holmes, who was diagnosed with a form of
schizophrenia.
A jury on Thursday convicted
the 27-year-old former neuroscience graduate student of murder and other
charges for his 2012 assault at a midnight screening of a Batman movie
that killed 12 and wounded dozens of others.
The
same jurors will decide his sentence in the penalty phase of the trial,
which starts Wednesday and will take about a month. Even if they decide
Holmes should be executed, as prosecutors want, he would spend years in
prison as his mandatory appeals play out in court.
Holmes
pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but jurors rejected the claim
after two state-appointed psychiatrists testified he could distinguish
right from wrong, Colorado's test for sanity. But the two state
psychiatrists and two defense psychiatrists agreed he suffers from
mental illness.
If jurors had found Holmes was
insane, he would have been committed indefinitely to a state mental
hospital.
Instead, he could end up at the San Carlos Correctional
Facility, Colorado's 250-bed prison for inmates with mental illness,
where experts agree his treatment will be at a far lower standard than
if he were hospitalized.
"In most hospitals,
you don't have staff whipping out Tasers and pepper spray and using it
on their patients," said Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, who has
studied mental health treatment in prisons and recently wrote a report
detailing instances of mentally ill prisoners being beaten or so
violently restrained that they die.
"This kind of treatment isn't just
restricted to someone who's committed a horrific crime."
Last
year, Colorado's Department of Correction approved a $3 million
settlement to resolve a lawsuit from a family of an inmate with a form
of schizophrenia who died after being restrained in the San Carlos
prison. Staffers were videotaped joking as Christopher Lopez suffered
seizures and died. The agency said it fired three people.
A
spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections said no one was available
to comment Friday on the prison system's mental health care.
People
with mental illness sometimes wind up in jail because law officers
don't know what else to do with them, said Scott Glaser, executive
director of the Colorado chapter of the National Alliance on Mental
Illness.
And once in the criminal justice system, they find it hard to get out.
"They
cannot usually get effective treatment," Glaser said. "It increases
recidivism. If someone is dealing with a mental illness that affects
their decision-making. It's very easy for them to end up in the system
again."
Nationwide, a 2006 federal study
estimated that 56 percent of all prisoners in state custody suffered
from mental illness and 15 percent suffered from some sort of psychotic
disorder. Mental health advocates say their treatment is almost
uniformly substandard for a variety of reasons.
Mentally
ill people do not fare well in the crowded, loud environment of
prisons, the study concluded. They are more likely to have trouble
following rules, which makes them more likely to be punished and end up
in solitary confinement. The isolation of a solitary cell can vastly
aggravate their mental illness. They are also more likely to be victims
of sexual abuse, the study said.
Colorado
lawmakers banned solitary confinement for inmates with serious mental
illness after a prisoner who had been held in solitary for much of his
eight-year term was suspected of killing the state prisons chief, Tom
Clements, in 2013.
"Prison is a pretty
horrific place to be, especially if you have a mental illness," said
Laura Usher of the National Alliance on Mental Illness' national office.
The
incarceration of mentally ill inmates in jails and prisons has been a
persistent national problem since the widespread closure of mental
hospitals in the 1970s. The promised local community care system to
handle the newly released mentally ill never materialized, and now they
often end up behind bars. There the Constitution entitles them to basic
medical treatment, said Dr. Renee Binder, president of the American
Psychiatric Association, but it's often hard to meet that standard.
The
APA and other groups are pushing for more programs to keep the mentally
ill out of prison initially - be those special courts or local
treatment.
"When someone ends up in jail and
prison and has a serious mental illness, it's really a problem with the
system," Binder said. "The question needs to be asked: `Could we have
prevented this?'"
