A woman in Iowa serving jail time for prostitution is diagnosed as mentally ill (schizophrenic) and placed on medication. When she's transferred to prison, they decide not to give her the medicine anymore. She then had hallucinations and started acting, well, mentally ill, breaking prison rules. So Iowa transfers her to the prison medical facility and starts her on the medication again, and she improves. When she's well, they start punishing her -- for what she did when she wasn't taking the medicine that they wouldn't give her.

How many lives and how many billions of dollars could this country save each year if, like every other civilized nation, we admitted that people get mentally ill and we treated them? Instead, we pretend they don't exist, wait for them to break the law, and imprison them. We're not very bright sometimes.