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The American corrections system is teeming with mentally ill people who have been arrested for misbehaviors related to their illnesses. Those who present little or no danger to the public — and there are many — belong in psychiatric care instead of jails, where they are at greater risk of suicide and other forms of harm, primarily because the corrections staff is ill-equipped to care for them.

One such person was 56-year-old Jerome Murdough, a former Marine with psychiatric problems who was arrested for trespassing last month in a Harlem public housing project, where he had sought refuge from the cold. Jake Pearson of The Associated Press reported earlier today that Mr. Murdough was taken to New York City’s Rikers Island jail, where he was essentially “baked to death” in a sweltering cell where the temperature soared to at least 100 degrees.



As Mr. Pearson reported: “According to the city officials, Murdough was locked alone into his 6-by-10 cinder block cell at about 10:30 p.m. on Feb. 14, a week after his arrest. Because he was in the mental-observation unit, he was supposed to be checked every 15 minutes as part of suicide watch, they said. But Murdough was not discovered until four hours later, at about 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 15. He was slumped over in his bed and already dead. When Murdough was found and his cell opened, his internal body temperature and the temperature in the cell were at least 100 degrees. Those temperatures could have been higher before he was discovered because the cell had been closed for several hours, the officials said.”

The Department of Correction is investigating the case.

This tragedy comes to light days after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the appointment of Joseph Ponte as Commissioner of Correction. Mr. Ponte came to national attention for his work as the Commissioner of The Maine Department of Corrections, where he cut back on solitary confinement and eliminated the use of disciplinary segregation for the mentally ill. His challenge in New York City is to end the overuse of solitary confinement, curtail the use of excessive force and improve the system’s capacity for dealing with the mentally ill.

The appointment is all to the good, of course, but it comes too late for Jerome Murdough.