Reformed Criminal Matthew Charles on Mental Illness in the Prison System

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

The reality of having people incarcerated with mental illnesses and I'm not talking about the criminal psychotic mindset. But mental illnesses that keep them from functioning normally if you would. How often did you see that in the prison systems that you were part of? I will say in the princess, I would say probably, I want to say percent are greater than 50% of the time. Because a lot of people are there because mentally, they do have something going on internally. Now what that is, I can't put a thing around. I know, you know, just like whenever we go volunteer at the halfway, I have my high school. Go volunteer at the pantry and do things in the neighborhood. We encounter people that are at our homeless and they have a medical condition that causes them to be a paddock or homeless and they can't overcome that without the right help or treatment. But they have become that because I have spoke with a lot of them trying to find out, you know, how did this happen? And sometimes it could be the fact that, you know, their wife left them on their wife died, you know what I mean? Right. And they just couldn't have it. Sometimes it just made the fact that, you know, they explore. You know, with these drugs and the drugs doing what they normally do over tip them. You know what I mean? So therefore now addicted. So people become mentally ill for a variety of reasons. That's the reason that I say even though I will say anywhere from 50 to 60% of the people, you know, total number of people that were incarcerated with me, but now I need to go the opposite way. I would say 40 to 50% of the people I won't go into. Yes, I would say what are the 50% of the people I will say internally, I think they have something going on because you see a lot of people being quiet or speaking to those sales or these distributing behavior that you know is not right for normal people. And then you also have some of them that are the same way that you really can't distinguish whether they have that are not, but they just be in that way because they'd rather be a loner so that they don't be preyed on the people lead them alone or think that they could be a violent threat if they will

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