Okay, What Exactly Did Chris Cillizza MEAN By “Mental Health Sentencing”?
I rarely watch TV news shows anymore, much less cable political talk shows. (Okay, I rarely watch TV at all anymore.) But I happened to watch Chris Matthews’ Hardball tonight on MSNBC. The topic was, of course, gun control. (Actually, the lack thereof, and whether is any real chance that that might change now.) And Washington Post political blogger and reporter* Chris Cillizza was answering Matthews’ question about what he thought was the problem with this country. As in, why do we have so many mass shootings? Matthews suggested some possibilities. Is it the absence of meaningful gun laws? Is it lack of health care to treat mental illness? (At least that’s how I recall it; I haven’t reviewed a transcript of the show.) Or is it a lack of understanding that mental health issues could be treated by alternative medicine? For instance, if one would consider trying CBD joints, many of the problems regarding mental health could subside. You could as well consider a runtz purple vape pen that has the potential to relieve mental illness such as anxiety.
Cillizza responded with something like, “It’s gun laws. It’s healthcare. It’s mental health sentencing.” His emphasis, not mine.
It’s mental health sentencing? Really? How so, exactly–since actually there is no such thing. Not formally, any way. In truth, of course, large percentages of people serving prison sentences in this country, including people serving very long sentences, are mentally ill, some of them severely so. But, thanks to John Hinckley, mental illness almost never is a defense to a criminal charge in this country. Presumably, Cillizza knows this.
But also presumably, he knows that Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Cho Seung-Hui, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and the others–several of whom (including Lanza, Cho, Harris and Klebold) killed themselves at the end of their maniacal spree–had no criminal record and therefore no mental illness sentence. Whatever that is.
What concerns me about Cillizza’s statement is that the very last thing we should do is allow gun-rights fanatics to try to turn this debate into one about whether prison sentences for mentally ill mass shooters are long enough to serve as a deterrent–which is what I assume that Cillizza meant. Lanza and most of the others sentenced themselves to death. And Loughner’s plea agreement calls for a life sentence. But I doubt that that will deter the next severely mentally ill teenager or young man who has access to an assault rifle and enough ammunition to kill or maim a lot of people during a rampage, and wants to do exactly that.
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*This post originally referred incorrectly to Cillizza as a political columnist.
those states that have the death penalty have twice the murder rate of those that dont, and the US has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, almost one & half times that of #2 Belarus…
Yes, the issue of mental health care is now popular.
What I want to know is what is going on in this nation such that we have so many young boys growing up with psych issues? The CDC says 8.4% of the 3 to 17 yr olds are dx’d with ADHD (children in general).
With that, we see the results for boys/males. Are we missing it in girls/females being that we are not seeing such dramatic actions publicly played out as we are seeing with boys/males?
In the 90’s it was documented that the US was the worlds largest user of ritalin (90% of the worlds production). In a posting 2011 I sited from a study: Consequently, Americans, constituting only 4.6% of the world’s population, have been consuming 80% of the global opioid supply, and 99% of the global hydrocodone supply, as well as two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs.
The results of the Iraq war was an unpresedented increase in PTSD and a questioning of why were our young solders having such issues. Is this generation that different from past generations?
What is missing in our enviroment or what is present such that we are seeing such psych issues? Lastly, have we always been so mentally incapable such that more people today think the president is a muslim than when he first ran? Though an October AP poll found more people believed he was Jewish than a Muslim!
Lastly, regarding Newtown CT. Why has it taken the killing of 6 yr olds for the US interpret this as a hammer blow right between the eys when such killings in schools involving teenagers and college students were not? Have we decided that there is an age point at which we believe life has not been lived long enough thus, we need to act, but at said point life has been lived long enough to have been considered a life of experience and thus no as socially tragic? Or is it that we think high school age children are not as helpless in such a situation as elementary children?
We have a lot more soul searching to do in the US than just how are we going to deal with guns.
By far the highest incarceration rate, rjs, except for South Africa, whose incarceration rate is, I believe, only slightly lower than the U.S.’s.
I’m really not even sure that Cillizza meant what it sounds like he meant. I just can’t think of anything else he might have meant, though. It just struck me as absurd.
And, great point about the murder rates in death-penalty states vs. in non-death-penalty states.
wikipedia has a 220 country table of incarceration rates updated 10/7/12, better than my previous text link;
here’s the worst 10, with prisoners per 100K:
1 United States of America 730
2 St. Kitts and Nevis 649
3 Seychelles 641
4 Virgin Islands (USA) 539
5 Rwanda 527
6 Georgia 514
7 Cuba 510
8 Russian Federation 502
9 Anguilla (United Kingdom) 480
10 Virgin Islands (UK) 460
Mrs. Rustbelt, an experienced psychiatric nurse, mentioned that.
“State mental hospitals were really lousy places, but provided a place to lock someone up for their own safety and the safety of others. Lousy options were better than no options.”
She also accurately predicted the shooter was heavily into violent video games.
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Lots of people are into violent video games. And movies, and books, and other forms of escapist media.
99.99999% of them don’t go into an elementary school and start shooting children.
I take my hat off to your wife, Tom, for what she does.
J.Godwin’s point is on the mark. Any one, two or three or more behaviors may be shared between the “normal” and the abberant members of our culture. Being able to cite an interest in violence after the fact is a lot easier and safer than predicting behavior before its occurence based on a profile of one or more characteristics of an individual’s behavior.
There is no strategy for predicting behavior before the fact other than the exihibit of such behavior in the past. This is not a likely scenario in the case of any mass murder. For such perpetrators once is all the chance they get. The prediction that we can make based upon historical facts is that mass murder is highly likely to occur in cultures that celebrate violence in general and make weapons of mass destruction readily available. Does that sound like a place you know?
BTW, all the attention given to Lanza’s mental status is certainly premature and misguided. There is no developmental disabillity that is associated with violent behavior other than the violence perpetrated upon those who suffer the disability.
Jack said…that mass murder is highly likely to occur in cultures that celebrate violence in general and make weapons of mass destruction readily available. Does that sound like a place you know?
exactly.
where is all the outrage over the hundreds of waristani and pakistani children that have been killed by the drone strikes that we have enabled by our silence?
we’re reaping what we’ve sown…
@ rj, im afraid we’re just getting started…
reports that the U.S. military (and presumably others) have been making steady progress developing drones that operate with little, if any, human oversight. For the time being, developers in the U.S. military insist that when it comes to lethal operations, the new generation of drones will remain under human supervision. Nevertheless, unmanned vehicles will no longer be the “dumb” drones in use today; instead, they will have the ability to “reason” and will be far more autonomous, with humans acting more as supervisors than controllers.
http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2012/10/01/why-killing-should-remain-a-human-enterprise/
see no drone, hear no drone, speak no drone
well, as for highly likely
is one in a hundred million highly likely?
one in ten million?
one in one million?
Just count the number of such incidents over the last decade and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what is meant by highly likely. Some phenomenon don’t lend themselves to precise measurement. This is particularly the case when it comes to human behavior and exspecially the prediction of such. As I’ve already noted, the b est predictor of individual behavior is the past behavior of that same individual. In the absence of such pre & post measurement opportunities we can only fall back on approximations of what one will do based on the knowledge of what others have done in similar circumstances. That is the nature of the current contraversy. I especially like this explanation of the limits of measurement, in this case regarding the “science” of economics, from J.M. Keynes which was just posted on Naked Capitalism.
“Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
– John Maynard Keyne
Jack
I take it… subject to correction by a real statistician.. that if “one in a million” boys are born with “something wrong with them” that will result in their committing mass murder sometime during their lives, we would see an average of one mass murder per year in population about our size.
I don’t know if this is more or less the incidence per population in other countries. It could also be that there is something about our country that triggers some of these “something wrong with them” that would not be triggered in another country. I don’t know.
But I am not ready to call “highly likely” what may in fact be “highly unlikely” but relatively frequent in a very large population.
Nor am I prepared to give up ordinary human freedom because some people are convinced they must prevent tragedies like this “at all costs.”
“At all costs” it what justifies the “war on terror.” Some here are perilously close to calling for a war on (home grown) terror that would lock us all up,or out, and subject us all to someone else’s fear that we may be “different.”
We have had this kind of thing in the past, and usually after a week or so most folks forget. But it seems to me our “deciders” are looking for an excuse to keep a closer check on us.
“Nor am I prepared to give up ordinary human freedom because some people are convinced they must prevent tragedies like this “at all costs.”
No Dale, we’re not talking about “ordinary human freedom.” We are talking about gun control, and especially the control of rapid fire weapons that have no reasonable application in hunting or sport shooting. Why can the government control the use of fully automatic machine guns and then be Constitutionally prohibited from controlling the use of any similar weapon save for the rapidity of discharge?
ok, here’s a post that ties together the violent video games and the mass killing of children…dreams in infrared
Jack
i don’t like guns much myself, and wish the neighbors didn’t have them.
if you can limit gun ownership, fine with me. but watch out for the rest of the agenda.