'Shock-jock' policies are driving mentally ill people into jails

In some cases, the commission noted in a 2001 report, the response of the system to mental illness was not treatment but brutality or an increase in harshness or length of detention. And arrangements for the follow-up of prisoners with a mental illness after release from jail were also found to be seriously inadequate.

As Chris Puplick, a former NSW Liberal senator and human rights activist has correctly observed, unnecessarily confining people with mental illness in prisons is utterly self-defeating. In those institutions, these people, especially those with developmental or intellectual problems, will be at the bottom of the prison heap. These prisoners are the most likely to reoffend, says Puplick.

As Prime Minister John Howard and his state and territory colleagues contemplate a national strategy to combat mental illness in our community, they must wean themselves off the shock-jock-driven populist law-and-order policies that are driving mentally ill individuals into jails. And they must examine the reality that if an individual does not have a mental illness when he or she first enters prison, the chances of that individual leaving the prison system with some form of mental illness is extraordinarily high.

Prisons must be adequately resourced to tackle mental illness. Prison mental health services around Australia are understaffed and under-resourced. And prison staff often treat mentally ill prisoners as at-risk prisoners, meaning they are segregated and punished for bad behaviour.

Now that our political leaders have decided to tackle mental illness as a nationwide issue, they have the chance to make substantial inroads into the area which afflicts more people than any other sector of society - our prisons.