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.
An investigation by WITF and NPR looked at 456 of those incidents from 25 county jails in Pennsylvania, during the last quarter of 2021.

Npr