I assume most everyone remembers last season's big twist (Elliot was in jail not living at his mother’s house for the first half of Season 2)?

As you probably remember, if you have read any of my recaps of Season 2 (or my series on Orange Is the New Black), I am also a formerly incarcerated person.

Well over 2 million people in the United States (which is more than the rest of the prison population of the world combined). Another approximately 5 million people are on parole or probation. As of 2008 one out of every 31 adults in the United States was in prison or jail.

Perhaps more disturbing, as Sheriff Tom Dart mentioned in his 2016 Report on reforming mental health treatment in jails, “Ten times more mentally ill people are housed in America’s jails and prisons than in mental health hospitals.”

Prisons and jails have become our de facto mental health treatment facilities.

And if you wonder why I wrote a 20 part treatment of the Mr. Robot companion book “Red Wheelbarrow” this might be as good a place as any to look.

After I was arrested I was taken to the Macomb County jail for processing. They asked me a few questions, and since I had never been arrested before I answered the question about depression wrong (I admitted that I was feeling a bit depressed).

Faster than you could say “mistake,” I was put in a green padded suit and taken to the suicide watch room (a plexiglass cell visible from the outside on all sides). After they decided I wasn’t a risk to myself I was moved to the mental health wing where I spent 23 hours of every day locked in a cell with nobody to talk to and nothing to do (you were allowed out of your cell to shower and make phone calls or watch the unit television for one hour a day).

About 24 hours later, I was moved out of the mental health wing and then I bailed out. But while I was there I learned that some people had served over a year in those 23-hour cells.

Not all the so-called treatment that I saw in my three years of incarceration was that brutal, but nothing that I saw made me feel very good about how we treat the mentally ill in this country. Several weeks later, I ran into the therapist who was responsible for springing me from the mental health wing at Macomb and I had to ask her the question that had been burning in my mind ever since, I asked her:

“If I really had been mentally ill, and needed treatment, how would locking me up for 23 hours a day in solitary for a year help me get better?”

She responded after a long pause:

“It’s not optimal”

There may never have been a better description of the casual cruelty of the way our society treats the mentally ill.