Waiting for an Echo
The Madness of American Incarceration
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
*L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist*
*New York Times Book Review Paperback Row*
*New York Times Books to Watch for in July*
*Time Best New Books July 2020*
Galvanized by her work in our nation's jails, psychiatrist Christine Montross illuminates the human cost of mass incarceration and mental illness
Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. Several years ago, she set out to investigate why so many of her patients got caught up in the legal system when discharged from her care--and what happened to them therein.
Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American incarceration. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones.
The stark world of American prisons is shocking for all who enter it. But Dr. Montross's expertise--the mind in crisis--allowed her to reckon with the human stories behind the bars. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. In these encounters, Montross finds that while our system of correction routinely makes people with mental illness worse, just as routinely it renders mentally stable people psychiatrically unwell. The system is quite literally maddening.
Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this anguished and impeccably researched account, psychiatrist Montross (Falling into the Fire) examines how the American justice system fails to protect, treat, and rehabilitate incarcerated people with mental health issues. Drawing on her experiences conducting competency evaluations for detainees, and visiting numerous prisons around the country, Montross argues that minorities, the impoverished, and the mentally ill are disproportionately targeted for harsher sentences, and that prisoners are too often left to languish in solitary confinement, where sensory deprivation can worsen, or even cause, mental instability. At a juvenile detention center, she learns that teenagers there can be kept for up to a year in solitary despite studies showing the importance of human contact for the developing brain. Chicago's Cook County Jail offers a rare glimpse of hope, as Montross sits in on a cognitive behavioral group therapy session where inmates reflect on their pasts in order to process their traumas. In the book's final section, she offers practical solutions, including changes to the probation and parole systems that would give the formerly incarcerated better resources for getting their lives back on track, and mandatory periodic mental health evaluations for all inmates. This eye-opening call for reform exposes an overlooked crisis in America's prisons. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated this was the author's first book. It also misstated that the author met a teenager who had spent a year in solitary confinement at a juvenile detention facility.
