special report: in louisiana jail, deaths mount as mental health pleas unheeded
EAST BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) - The East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a squat brick building with low-slung ceilings and walls sometimes smeared with feces, is the face of a paradigm shift: penitentiaries as mental health care providers. Across the United States thousands of jails are sheltering a wave of inmates accused of crimes and serving time while suffering from illnesses ranging from depression to schizophrenia. The shift is a byproduct of the plunging numbers housed in psychiatric inpatient treatment centres, a total that fell from 471,000 in 1970 to 170,000 by 2014. In Louisiana, the fallout exacerbated after a former governor shuttered or privatised a network of public hospitals that provided mosaic medical and psychiatric care to the accused. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison is where Louis Jonathan Fano, afflicted with bipolar disorder and haunted by demons, found himself on Halloween Eve 2016 after fleeing a Greyhound Bus and wandering city streets naked and crazed. Book...