When police found Ishmail Thompson, he was standing naked outside a Dauphin County hotel, where he had just punched a man. A mental health specialist working with the county prison said Thompson should be sent to a hospital for psychiatric care.
But at the hospital, a doctor ran some tests and cleared him to return to jail. With that decision, Thompson went from being a mental health patient to a Dauphin County Prison inmate. Here, he was expected to comply with orders — or be forced to.
Thompson soon would be locked in a physical struggle with corrections officers — one of 5,144 such “use of force” incidents that occurred last year in Pennsylvania county jails. A WITF investigation found that almost one in three uses of force from 25 jails during the last three months of 2021 involved a person who was having a mental health crisis or who had a diagnosed mental illness. The situation brings risks ranging from lasting psychological trauma to death.