Law Enforcement and Disabilities

There are over 300 million people in the United States, of which nearly 274 million are identified as having one or more disabilities of some type. With that in mind, the PEW Report (2008) recently noted that the U.S. prison population nearly tripled between 1987 and 2007, and nearly 1.6 million people are held in state or federal custody with an additional 724 thousand serving time in local jails. These statistics equate to a startling fact: one in 100 individuals are incarcerated and one in 31 are on probation or parole in the United States (PEW Report). Assuming these statistics to be accurate, more than 2 million individuals with disabilities identified or not, are currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons. In 2002, the National GAINS Center, which is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, found that nearly three-quarters of jail detainees with severe mental illnesses also had co-occurring disorders and often had complicated histories of unemployment, homelessness, addiction, victimization and inadequate health care.