The Jail I work at has on average 33% of inmates on some sort of mental health drug. There is nothing we can do when the state hospitals are full and the local hospitals flat out refuse to make secure sections for the mental. Because of the hospitals not wanting to make secured sections, we have to keep the mentals with criminal charges...

Hey waterfront...you must be quite a winner to call this dead woman a LOOSER!!!! Seriously, when will all of you figure out the difference between LOOSER And LOSER!!???

This is a message board so we're getting the same anonymous macho posturing we get on any crime story. The only countries that actually do treat prisoners this way face international sanctions for doing so. Of course, we are now a country that officially endorses torture, so perhaps we have no moral standards remaining.

Buck A$$ naked in a concrete cell, 3 squares a day and a hose down on Saturday. Or we can coddle them.

Prison has become a warehouse for those with mental illness in this country. This is shameful. Mental illness can be treated successfully.

From the court records site, she seemed to have an anger issue, perhaps brought out more by being with a group. I don't know, just trying to get a picture from reading the court website for why she was in prison. She had issues from a young age and needed help even earlier than at Taycheedah. I hope her family maybe takes some of the settlement and reaches out to other young girls from the same background and tries to help them.

How does taking money from the taxpayers right this wrong?

Why did this woman not seek help "BEFORE" she went to prison, her family must have been involved with her life, because they are there now to collect the money.

If she was doing time at Taycheedah, I wouldn't exactly call her "my" peer. But help should have been made available to her.

doing a crime, paying with time has little to do with pleading for psychiatric help. If someone is mentally ill, there is a "duty to warn" or "duty to provide" in the code of ethics of way too many professions to have had this happen. If it would have happened to some rich kid, it would have been all over the world news as being a huge deal. Yet, because it is someone that is incarcerated, people seem to care less. What a shame how our society treats its peers!

Why is the Department of Justice threatening to sue? They should have already sued. I'm sure that they've issued warnings and a timeline to Taycheedah to comply, but to continue to allow the facility to operate in this manner seems irresponsible.

I found this at www.jsonline.com--from 2007 (March?). Sounds like a very disgusting state of affairs up at Taycheedah...

"In a separate action, the federal government last year reported Taycheedah's mental health treatment for prisoners was unacceptable and the U.S. Department of Justice has threatened to sue. In a yearlong investigation, officials found prisoners with mental illness - some as young as 15 - were regularly placed in isolation cells, receiving little treatment and were given psychotropic drugs for months without monitoring by a doctor."

So, "doing the time" means going without psychiatric care? Brilliant, citizen.