When police arrived on the scene, they found Ishmail Thompson standing naked outside a hotel near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had just punched a man. After his arrest, a mental health specialist at the county jail said Thompson should be sent to the hospital for psychiatric care.
However, after a few hours at the hospital, a doctor cleared Thompson to return to jail. With that decision, he went from being a mental health patient to a Dauphin County Prison inmate. At that point, he was expected to comply with orders — or be forced to.
Within hours of returning to jail from the hospital, Thompson was locked in a physical struggle with corrections officers. His story is one of more than 5,000 “use of force” incidents that were recorded in 2021 inside Pennsylvania county jails.
