Too often, in the absence of adequate mental health treatment options, jails and prisons end up as the default provider of mental health services to those in crisis. This is wrong; New York must strive to make care available to all who need it before they end up harming themselves or others in a way that lands them in the criminal justice system.
In the meantime, though, the reality is that more than half of those who do end up on Rikers Island have some type of mental illness, and that’s just people with diagnoses. This fact, combined with the perpetual management and supervision failures at the jail, lead to tragedies like the weekend’s death by suicide of 25-year-old Dashawn Carter.
The formerly homeless man had been sent back to Rikers from a psychiatric hospital just days before his death, the fourth so far this year on the island. Carter was cleared by correction staff to be held in the general population, in all likelihood not because he seemed truly fine to be left to his own devices, but because there was nowhere to send him to get the help he needed.
