The field of prisons corrections is a challenging one. Our society
             continually changes its mind about what it wants prisons to do: we want
             them to punish wrong-doers, but we also want to help the prisoners return
             to society ready to be productive citizens. But today's prisons also face
             important issues that may not be obvious to the country's taxpayers. Ted
             Strickland, a congressional representative from Ohio, used to work as a
             psychologist in an Ohio prison. He reports some of the behaviors he had to
             deal with while trying to help prisoners who were mentally ill: he had
             urine flung in his face and was threatened multiple times with violence.
             One time someone threatened to throw HIV-positive blood in his face
             (Strickland, 2002). He is one of a number of prison professionals who
             realize that today's prisons contain a large and growing population of
             prisoners with significant mental health problems. Many of these inmates
             hove problems with substance abuse as well (Sigurdson, 2000).
             The prison problem is related to problems we have dealing with mental
             illness in society in general. Over the past thirty years, 90% of beds in
             state psychiatric hospitals have been eliminated (Sigurdson, 2000). In
             fact, in most major cities the jails house more people with serious mental
             illness than the local psychiatric hospitals (Sigurdson, 2000). United
             States hails and prisons have more inmates with mental illnesses, in fact,
             than are housed in all the state hospitals combined (Sigurdson, 2000). To
             be fair, if the mental illness were the inmates' only problems, they
             probably would not have been hospitalized outside of prison. Many people
             with even conditions as severe as schizophrenia are not hospitalized.
             However, they are present in our prisons, and living under stressful
             Some experts feel that the increase in mental health
             patients/prisoners is related to the recent mental heal...