Police officers, sometimes in an attempt to provide mentally ill people with treatment, have said things to me: "We know if we take them to jail, they will at least get 'three hots and a cot.' They will at least get their psychiatric medications." And so taking them to jail feels like an act of compassion.

We would never arrest someone to make sure that they received treatment for their cancer. We only do that in this situation of the mentally ill, and that, to me, seems like a travesty.

My son has mental health and addiction problems that have landed him in jail. Instead of help, they've humiliated and punished him. He did NOT get his meds either. When they discovered he was suicidal, they put him in a brightly lit padded room with a hole in the floor for waste and left him there with the lights on all day and night and no interaction other than disgusting food and water for four days.

Nutraloaf:

ingredients that tick off a checklist of nutritional needs but are then combined and prepared in a way that is absolutely disgusting when you hear people describe the experience of eating it.

It's intended to be disgusting. And so the reason that I wrote about it was really to get at the urge that I see so much in our nation's [incarceration] practices, which is to make people suffer.

My son has described this to me. Food as a punishment. Disgusting.

the foremost thing that I saw over and over again is how much we want people to suffer once they're held within our jails and prisons

Norway faced similar problems. To fix them:

So they decided to do a needs assessment of everyone who came into prison immediately and when they arrived to see, "Do you have a substance use problem? Well, then we will use the time that you're incarcerated to get you mental health treatment for your addiction. Do you need job training? Do you need education? Do you need language assistance? Do you need anger management classes or parenting classes? What are the root causes of the behaviors that are getting you arrested that we can try to address so that we'll use this time in prison constructively, so that when you leave prison, you don't come back?" And that fundamental shift in philosophy was really fascinating to me.

Why can't we do the same?