Guest Speaker

Today we had a guest speaker, Diane, who at first was kind of hard for me to focus on because..well lets just say she was "out there." not in a bad way but just kind of crazy. haha. but other than that she was actually on point with a lot of things. She started off with an exercise in which you determined if the level of seriousness of the social issue was strongly agreed with or strongly disagreed with. the issues varied from poverty, weath, cancer, sexual priority, and mentally disabled issues. I strongly agree with mental issues being a very serious social issue. Not only because "society" is somewhat fearful of these mentally disabled people but because these mentally disabled people are far worse than we think.

About 40% of the inmates in the Austin prisons are mentally disabled. Now just think how many are throughout America! The percentages are outstanding actually. Most of the mentally disabled people are either homeless or just completely unaware of their mental state which can cause them to commit crimes. When those crimes are committed they automatically get thrown in jail and then that's it. Help usually doesn't get provided for them until after they've been in the system for a couple of days; some even more than that. With them being in the prison system their mental state gets worse and then they get sent to a mental hospital and when the doctors feel as though they are capable of taking care of themselves they are released...back into the prison systems! Now that's just going to  keep repeating the cycle over and over again. With that being said, I went to this mental heath in the criminal justice systems in the career center today and the social workers talked about how they give these people different options when dealing with criminal offenses. Basically they provide services dealing with anything they need to try and better the mentally disabled criminals from becoming worse in jail, post-jail, and possibly re-entering the jail system. I think that what they are doing is incredible. To offer these mentally disabled criminals help and provide them services that they need only gives them the hope of getting out of jail, never going back, and the ability to live a normal life.

Overall Diane's lecture was interesting and i took in a lot of what she said.