When police arrived on the scene, they found Ishmail Thompson standing naked outside a hotel near Harrisburg, Pa., after he had just punched a man. After they arrested him, a mental health specialist at the county jail said Thompson should be sent to the hospital for psychiatric care.
However, after a few hours at the hospital, a doctor cleared Thompson to return to jail. With that decision, he went from being a mental health patient to a Dauphin County Prison inmate. Now he was expected to comply with orders — or be forced to.
Thompson soon would be locked in a physical struggle with corrections officers — one of 5,144 such “use of force” incidents that occurred in 2021 inside Pennsylvania county jails.
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