Whether it’s pharmaceutical companies’ noncompliance or the awakened humanity of the courts, the death penalty is increasingly unpopular today. Washington is now the 20th state to overturn the death penalty, a trend no doubt tied to the difficulty of obtaining pharmaceuticals necessary for lethal injection. Next session, I will again propose legislation repealing the death penalty, replacing it with life in prison without the possibility of parole.” Ferguson went so far as to assure us, “We should act quickly to remove the death penalty from state law once and for all. Key players, including the state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Governor Jay Inslee, praised this move as a distinction of humaneness. Roth proposes sound alternatives, such as San Antonio's investment in a 24/7 crisis center devoted to keeping people with mental illness 'out of the criminal justice system and into effective treatment.' Roth strikes a powerful balance between big picture analysis and individual stories to make this searing account of America's misguided treatment of the mentally ill hard to ignore.ON OCTOBER 11, 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the state’s use of the death penalty due to overwhelming evidence of racial bias. Later, when he turned violent, correction officers with no access to his medical records or understanding of the care he needed put him in solitary confinement. Roth provides a deeply disturbing synthesis of her research, both academic and in the field, including conversations with professionals, and the mentally ill, to show how despite the increased understanding of mental illness over the last two centuries, and apart from the development of more effective medications, 'we continue to treat people with mental illness almost exactly as we did before electricity was invented.' In one of the more unsettling examples, a businessman and former firefighter with bipolar disorder was arrested for indecent exposure after he stripped naked in the hallway of a hotel when he was unable to open the door to his room.

Marketplace reporter Roth's cri de coeur uses moving anecdotes of how the American criminal justice system treats the mentally ill to make the problem palpable.

Insane alisa roth