South Carolina is hardly alone in struggling to care for the mentally ill inmates filling its jails. But other states have made greater strides in devising potential fixes ... .
Some inmates with mental illness refused treatment, pushing them closer toward crisis. They ate their own waste, destroyed their cells, screamed through the night and declined food and water. Some didn't survive ... .
Hundreds of mentally ill people are languishing for months in SC jails, deprived of needed treatment in a legal purgatory that feeds a cycle of incarceration, despair and avoidable deaths, a Post and Courier investigation has found ... .
A Post and Courier investigation found dozens of defendants who bounced between the criminal justice and mental health systems without receiving long-term care, placing some unwitting victims in harm’s way ... .
Decades ago, South Carolina shifted patients from psychiatric hospitals to community treatment. The move has done little to improve their fate as lawmakers shortchanged them on resources. And jails became the new asylums ... .