Mental Health Support Crisis in Prisons

I am an offender that has been incarcerated for over six years. I've met over thousands of individuals from all different races, and backgrounds. Looking around, the compound is different but the insides are the same. Being incarcerated for six years is hard. Hell, being incarcerated in general is hard but you tend to lose a part of you because you feel forgotten, and left alone in the dirt. But one thing, I find that we all have in common is how broken we are on the inside. There's a lot of codependency. There's a need for drugs, commissary, material things, and even companionship. There's no "mental health" help here, just continuous hurt. The mental health staff here is a joke. The therapists don't last long. For example, they'll start January 10th, and be gone January 21st. So why would I "trust" a stranger for about a couple of weeks with my personal information, and never see or hear from them again? "Trust" here? There is no trusting anyone here. No one pushes nor motivates you to do absolutely anything positive with your time. There are individuals here that have been incarcerated for over twenty years, and still don't have a G.E.D. People that have never done drugs before are doing them now, and are becoming addicts. That sad thing about the whole situation is that, I've learned more criminal things in prison than I did when I was free. Honestly, I've never been in trouble before prior to me getting this charge that I'm currently doing time for. Did I know how the system worked? No. I knew absolutely nothing about the courts, jails or prisons. Overall, it's a complete joke. I was a young adult that ended up in an unfortunate situation that led me to getting misrepresented in court with a lawyer that lied, and got me fifteen years in prison. So many people get released from prison and have their chance to go home and do right... come right back in the matter of months. It scares me, that there's no hope for ex-felons. It saddens me, that they've learned nothing during their incarceration. We literally just sit back and wait for an individual to return back into intake, and we watch them destroy themselves once again. Why call this a correctional center? When no wrongs are being corrected? We get rewarded for being wrong and

disrespectful. We get yelled at for "trying" to better ourselves. This prison promotes recidivism, point blank

period. When will it stop?