Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness Audiobook (Free)

An urgent expose from the mental health crisis inside our courts, jails, and prisons.

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each home more people with mental ailments than any hospital. As much as half of most people in America’s jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings entails a person with such disorders.

Within this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the offender justice system to show how and just why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied medicine, abused, and punished in ways that produce them sicker.

Through close stories of individuals in the machine and the ones trying to fix it, Roth reveals the concealed forces behind this crisis and suggests what sort of fairer and even more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up demand legal justice reformers and anyone worried about the plight of our most vulnerable.