Flickr
In a sprawling first-person report from inside Chicago’s Cook County Jail, The Atlantic’s associate editor Matt Ford, shows how the mentally ill have come to make up a third of the mammoth jail’s 9,000 to 11,000 inmate population. The jail is struggling with the nationwide problem of how to treat the incarcerated “less like prisoners and more like patients.”
“[O]fficers can’t simply be guards anymore, [Cook County Sheriff] Tom Dart emphasizes. ‘You have to be a doctor. You have to be a nurse. You have to be a social worker. You have to be all of these things.’ ”
Read the full story here.