Before taking this course, I generally believed that people were rightfully in prison for their actions. Now, I have become aware of the discrepancies and flaws within the criminal justice system. One of the biggest discrepancies, aside from incarceration rates between white and black men, is mental illness. Something I wish would have been covered more in class. The conversation about mental illness is one we're only recently starting to have. For a long time, mental illness wasn't something that was talked about publicly. This conversation has a shorter history in American prisons. Throughout the semester I read articles regarding the criminal justice system and mental illness in the United States. Below I will try to describe how the criminal justice system fails when it encounters people with mental illnesses. I wanted to delve deeper into the issue of mental illness within prison walls because this affects me personally. I have a family member who suffers from bipolar disorder, and as I have read in these articles, he has had numerous run-ins with the police due to his illness. None of these encounters led to her arrest or conviction, but many of these encounters resulted in officers taking her or suggesting her family take her to psychiatric centers. Now following this course I realized how lucky I am not to have been arrested. As we talked about in class, women and Hispanics are the fastest growing population in prisons and she is both, in addition to having a mental disorder. Criminal justice officials understand the situation in their prisons regarding mental health, but have taken no action to address it. . For example: “According to the Department of Justice, abo... half of the document... what we saw with the Community Mental Health Act. This act took funds from state-run facilities and was promised to communities, but these communities have never seen that money. I would even dare to assume that this money also ended up in the police force. I believe the treatment money was used for local policing because most of the political resources were used by people with mental illnesses. For example, USA Today cites the story of one particular repeat offender “(the repeat offender) who was arrested more than 100 times, raking in more than $1 million in repeat arrests and incarceration-related costs.” This is not an isolated case, many cases of mentally ill and emotionally disturbed people tend to be repeat offenders. For example, the cops in my aunt's area have gotten used to being called to her house every couple of months.