Getting Away with Murder: A True Story

America is experiencing a mental health crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Fifty years ago, shocking conditions and abuses in psychiatric facilities resulted in nationwide closures with no viable plan to provide care for former and future patients. For the severely mentally ill, ever diminishing funding for mental health has resulted in a de facto return to the Middle Ages. In a justice system that criminalizes mental illness, people who desperately need mental health services are instead routinely rounded up and thrown into prisons for no more than a manifestation of their psychiatric conditions.

Having worked as a psychotherapist for nearly three years in a Florida state prison psychiatric unit, George Mallinckrodt experienced firsthand the ultimate consequences of failed national and state mental health policies. With high hopes, 20 years of counseling experience, and a determination to make a difference, he dove headlong into the miasma of prison counseling.

Join Mallinckrodt on the front lines in an eye-opening odyssey peppered with patients suffering a range of mental illness from paranoid schizophrenia to garden variety depression. George provided counseling to men who committed every crime imaginable—even grave robbery.

Getting Away With Murder is an insider's account of a prison psychiatric ward in which the aberrant and bizarre are daily occurrences. Honest, unflinching, and darkly humorous, Mallinckrodt’s memoir is populated with a host of colorful characters—patients and mental health staff alike.