An urgent expose of the mental wellness crisis inside our courts, jails, and prisons.

America has made mental disease a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each home more people with mental illnesses than any medical center. As much as half of most people in America’s jails and prisons possess a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings requires a person with such disorders.

In this revelatory publication, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep in the lawbreaker justice system to show how and just why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied medicine, abused, and punished in ways that produce them sicker.

Through romantic stories of people in the machine and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests what sort of fairer and even more humane approach might look. Insane is certainly a galvanizing wake-up demand legal justice reformers and anyone worried about the plight of our most susceptible.