Another crazy doin crazy....

[Tgace]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/alabama-hostage-standoff-jimmy-lee-dykes-court-date/story?id=18374414

I know that the real solution probably shouldn't be forced institutionalisim, but read about this guy. Shouldn't there have been a way to intervene with this guys crazy before it came to this? This guy didn't just "snap"....he was out awaiting court from an incident where he shot at his neighbors? Wtf? Nobody got a warrant to search his property for weapons?

There needs to be a way to deal with this..is a revisit to the asylum idea in order yet?

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[Tgace]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/presence-violent-psychotics_690602.html

yet, in the midst of our national hand wringing, one pertinent fact is persistently unmentioned. Since the passage of the Community Mental Health Act (1963) during the Kennedy administration, which mandated the closing of state mental institutions in favor of "community health centers" and outpatient care, and the massive and progressive "deinstitutionalization" of the mentally ill during the 1960s and '70s, the residents of those old state hospitals have been transferred, almost totally, from the wards to the streets, and with predictable results.

Few "community health centers" were ever built, of course, and psychotics off their meds aren't good outpatients. But the sudden emergence of mass populations of "homeless" people in cities during the 1970s and '80s seems to have caught Americans off guard. It also afforded a political opportunity: The existence of homeless people—ordinary folks just a paycheck away from disaster—was conveniently blamed on the domestic policies of the Reagan (or any subsequent Republican) administration. No attention was paid, no attention was invited, to the mental health of those who lounge, sleep, urinate, defecate, scream, or beg for food on the nation's sidewalks, stab the occasional passerby, or push bystanders onto subway tracks.

Those old state mental hospitals were, inevitably, unpleasant places, and from The Snake Pit (1948) to Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (1967) to Geraldo Rivera's Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace (1972), were relentlessly depicted in the popular culture in all their unpleasantness. But are contemporary circumstances an improvement? Under current law, in most states, it is extremely difficult to compel psychotic individuals, especially adults, to submit to treatment. More than a few of our mass killers had grown up in households where desperate parents, in vain, had sought to get them institutionalized.

Closer to home, the American Civil Liberties Union has been relentless in its advocacy for the rights of psychotics who terrorize library patrons, or against mayors who seek to prevent the homeless from freezing to death. Instead of a lumbering psychiatric bureaucracy, the insane are now in the care of police departments and courts, and warehoused not in asylums (with access to medication) but in prisons that allow the full expression of their psychosis.

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[jezr74]

Are shooting at neighbors common enough in some states that full investigations don't get resources assigned?

Horrible, imagine what the kids on the bus are going through let alone the hostage boy.

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[Dirty Dog]

Just to clarify, he was due in court for shooting at the neighbors truck, not the neighbor. That's vandalism, not attempted murder.

That aside, there were still plenty of signs that he ought not be allowed run around loose, let alone own guns. And if anybody wants to propse laws that would address these issues without affecting the ability of reasonable people to defend themselves, I'm all for it.
On the other hand, it's too bad there wasn't someone armed and willing to stop this guy before he got into the bunker.

 

[Tgace]

Just to clarify, he was due in court for shooting at the neighbors truck, not the neighbor. That's vandalism, not attempted murder.

All the same...taken in conjunction with his other behavior there should have been options other than bail and a court appearance. I agree with the rest of your post. Unfortunately its EASIER to blame/ban guns than it is to deal with this issue....

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[granfire]

All the same...taken in conjunction with his other behavior there should have been options other than bail and a court appearance. I agree with the rest of your post. Unfortunately its EASIER to blame/ban guns than it is to deal with this issue....

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ah, but it is his right to go off his meds and tote a boomstick.....

</sarcasm>

I do think that digging a bunker in the back yard should have tipped people off, but hey, it's his right to prep for Armageddon, too....

Ah the joy....second time my home state made the national news... suggesting strong chlorination of the gene pool...

 

[Tgace]

http://www.freep.com/article/201111...-hospitals-Michigan-incarcerates-mentally-ill

"We closed too many (hospitals), too quickly," Mark Reinstein, president of the Mental Health Association in Michigan, told me this month. "It wasn't done in a planned, rational way."
Community mental health agencies -- which were supposed to take up the slack but never received the resources to do so -- face continuing budget cuts. The state has resumed warehousing its mentally ill -- this time behind bars.

 

[Sukerkin]

So Care In The Community failed on both sides of the Atlantic - who would have thought it?!

Cultural Note: Care In The Community was the Tory programme that allowed them to spend less on mental institutions by essentially abandoning the malfunctioning (and their families if they had any) to fend for themselves.

Personal Note: Given that one of my close family is manic depressive paranoid schizophrenic I know what I talking about on this one through hard-earned experience.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/final_jails_v_hospitals_study.pdf

I. Executive Summary

(a) Using 2004&#8211;2005 data not previously published, we found that in the United States
there are now more than three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and
prisons than in hospitals. Looked at by individual states, in North Dakota there are
approximately an equal number of mentally ill persons in jails and prisons compared to
hospitals. By contrast, Arizona and Nevada have almost ten times more mentally ill
persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals. It is thus fact, not hyperbole, that
America&#8217;s jails and prisons have become our new mental hospitals.


(b) Recent studies suggest that at least 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have a
serious mental illness. In 1983 a similar study reported that the percentage was
6.4 percent. Thus, in less than three decades, the percentage of seriously mentally ill
prisoners has almost tripled.


(c) These findings are consistent with studies reporting that 40 percent of individuals with
serious mental illnesses have been in jail or prison at some time in their lives.


(d) It is now extremely difficult to find a bed for a seriously mentally ill person who needs
to be hospitalized. In 1955 there was one psychiatric bed for every 300 Americans. In
2005 there was one psychiatric bed for every 3,000 Americans. Even worse, the
majority of the existing beds were filled with court-ordered (forensic) cases and thus
not really available.


(e) In historical perspective, we have returned to the early nineteenth century, when
mentally ill persons filled our jails and prisons. At that time, a reform movement,
sparked by Dorothea Dix, led to a more humane treatment of mentally ill persons. For
over a hundred years, mentally ill individuals were treated in hospitals. We have now
returned to the conditions of the 1840s by putting large numbers of mentally ill persons
back into jails and prisons.


(f) Any state can solve this problem if it has the political will by using assisted outpatient
treatment and mental health courts and by holding mental health officials responsible
for outcomes. The federal government can solve this problem by conducting surveys to
compare the states; attaching the existing federal block grants to better results; and
fixing the federal funding system by abolishing the &#8220;institutions for mental diseases&#8221;
(IMD) Medicaid restriction.

 

[granfire]

that's a time when the special little snowflake needs not t be encouraged to be more special, for sure.

but we have discussed that time and time again.
The strain it does on the family and environment is huge.
and nothing is done before the individual is becoming criminal.
and by all means, the nutters and loonies don't belong in jail.
They are a danger to themselves, the other inmates (and from them) and for the staff.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/198510/37/Kendras-Story-Her-Killer-Speaks-For-The-First-Time

Scott Brown: "At the time you pushed Kendra what was your mental state?"Andrew Goldstein: "I was just out of the hospital, North General Hospital, about two weeks prior, I was hearing voices and I was living in paranoia. I would miss one or two clinic appointments and I wouldn't take my meds for a week or two.

"(That afternoon) I was walking down, waiting for the train to come and as I was starting to go down the path I started getting this aura, or this bad knowing. Then I'm behind Kendra, not right next to her but far behind her, I'm walking behind her and I just get this fit I can't control the urge to shove or to push. I remember on her shoulders, the push, and also seeing a shimmying or almost like a specter like an Aurora Borealis, you know Northern Lights. I don't know how to describe it, just a horrible event."

Scott Brown: "You felt as if somebody was controlling your body?"

Andrew Goldstein: "Yes, yes, yes that's how I describe it directly, yes. I mean, that might be part of the illness, I don't know I don't think so."

Scott Brown: "At the time, did you realize what you had done had caused her death?"

Andrew Goldstein: "Yes, well first of all I realized it had happened. I threw my hands up and said I don't know and then I walked back from that night, kneeled down and I walked back up to the wall from the platform and I said I had a psychotic attack, please take me to the hospital I killed a woman."

Scott Brown: "Do you feel you're responsible for Kendra's death?"

Andrew Goldstein: "Every time someone asks that I find myself in a conundrum where I was guilty or not. I don't know. I know physically I was the pusher, I don't want to be manipulative. I was mentally ill and I was irresponsible about my medication. That's such a hard question I know you want to get a good answer, I don't know."

Scott Brown: "Let me ask it another way. Do you regret what happened?"

Andrew Goldstein: "Oh definitely, definitely, that I can answer you. It should never have happened. That I regret, so if I could change time, like they say, if I could change time, I could go back to the past and do it all over again, I would never, ever have this happen again to Kendra."

Scott Brown: "If you had the ability to speak directly to Kendra's parents, what would you say to them?"

Andrew Goldstein: "I would say please, please forgive me. I would say you don't have to forgive me and you can hate me forever. I don't know how I can make up for the loss of Kendra or how I could make up for your daughter's death, even if you want to punch me or beat me up or put me on a cross or put me in jail or do something horrible."

Scott Brown: "Once you get out of here, what's to stop you from doing something like that again?"

Andrew Goldstein: "I've learned never ever ever to have this happen again. How would you prevent it? Well because of being in prison, going through counseling. If I have to take a train, I would walk all the way in the corner and say when that train comes with all of my mind, just crawl in that door so that would never, ever happen again (laughs)."

After speaking with Goldstein, we asked the Webdales if they wanted to hear what he said. They said they did.

Even though they had sat through both of Goldstein's trials, and heard his videotaped interrogation by police Kendra's parents were transfixed by what Goldstein said to us.

Scott Brown: "What's your reaction after seeing and hearing him?"

Pat Webdale: "Wow, I'm overwhelmed. It's a person with a mental illness looking at you and telling you what his mental illness is all about, sad, sad."

Scott Brown: "When you heard him expressing regret, did that..."

Pat Webdale: "Yes I felt very, I felt his pain, I could say that, I felt his pain."

Ralph Webdale: "I felt he more rambled, I didn't get that same impression that he was as sincere or knew what was happening. And I think anyways, I would have a very tough time forgiving something like that, he took something very valuable to our family away and I'd have a tough time to accept that apology."

Scott Brown: "After watching and listening to this does it answer any questions for you?"

Pat Webdale: "Yes, sitting here watching Andrew Goldstein tell the story of 23rd street, there's more information then I've had before, yes. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a good thing for me. For me personally yes it's a good thing. I thank you for doing that."

Now believe it or not, after receiving credit for good time Goldstein is scheduled to be released from prison in about five and a half years. He would then be on strict parole for about nine years after that - if he were to stop taking his medication or not go to counseling - as he did in the weeks before he killed Kendra - Goldstein would have his parole revoked.

No offense to the many good parole officers I know out there...but my faith in the efficacy of parole is not very high. And after his "strict parole" is up???

 

[celtic_crippler]

The guy's got a well documented history of acting like a loon with a gun... it should have never reached this point.

The real question should be, "How did it?"

 

[granfire]

http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/198510/37/Kendras-Story-Her-Killer-Speaks-For-The-First-Time



No offense to the many good parole officers I know out there...but my faith in the efficacy of parole is not very high. And after his "strict parole" is up???

then we a re going through the same song and dance routine again.

It would be more merciful to him and others in his shoes to put them in a mental hospital.
They can be decent enough, even under lock down conditions....