To Help the Babies

This is a fascinating story of a woman who has spent most of her life in and out of trouble with New York State because of her delusions. The entire four-part series is well-worth reading, but I have pasted some telling quotes below:

On June 16, Tara approached a mother pushing her seven-month-old daughter in a stroller down Montague Street. Tara tried to touch the baby, then followed the mother into Waldenbooks, tailed her to the second floor, and reached over to touch the child again. On June 20, Tara strode down Clinton Street alongside a nanny with a stroller. "Give me the baby!" she said. "Give me the baby!" She accosted this same nanny later that day and grabbed the child's legs.
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Tara's concern was not new, just a variation on thoughts that had been tumbling around her mind for years. For more than a decade, she'd been obsessed with plastic rain covers—the ones that parents place over a stroller to keep their baby dry. Whenever Tara saw a baby under a plastic cover, she was convinced that the baby could not breathe, that it desperately needed fresh air. She would approach people she saw pushing baby carriages and ask them to lift the cover. If they refused, Tara would try to do it herself.
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Tara's arrest made the papers. "Woman Busted as Serial Baby Grabber," declared the Daily News. The New York Post dubbed her a "Kidnap-Rap Wacko."
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The Prolixin injections kept Tara's delusions at bay, but there were side effects too. "When I'm not on medication, I think about a zillion things during the day," she said. "A lot of times, I felt like I was in heaven." Prolixin suppressed not only her delusions, but also her imagination. Now she was bored all the time, and depressed too. "I can't think of anything while I'm on this medication," she said. "Your mind doesn't turn the same way it used to. It's almost like a little lobotomy."
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The documents that angered Jean the most were the insurance claim forms from Pilgrim state hospital, where Tara had spent 18 months at a cost of about $15,000 per month. Medicare paid these bills, but to Jean they represented yet another insane aspect of the mental health system: The price tag for Tara's stay at Pilgrim had come to more than $180,000 a year, and yet Tara had come out no better than she went in. "Where the hell does all the money go?" Jean would say. "It's absolutely mind-boggling! For that kind of money, each patient could go on a world tour with a private therapist."
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Ever since Jean had started going to court for Tara, she paid close attention to news stories about the criminal justice system. One of the cases that bothered her the most involved Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, the young couple from New Jersey who killed their newborn son by putting him in a plastic bag and tossing him in a dumpster. Brian spent only 20 months in prison; Amy did 24 months. Already, Tara had been in Rikers longer than both of them.
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Many parents liked the Mental Health Court because it kept their children out of state prison, but Jean was skeptical about whether it would work for Tara. To get into a mental health program, Tara would have to plead guilty to attempted kidnapping. If she completed the program without getting into any more trouble, the felony would be erased from her record and she'd be allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. It seemed simple enough, except that when it came to Tara nothing was ever simple. If things went awry—if, for example, she convinced someone to decrease her Prolixin dosage, the delusions returned, and she began trying to save babies once again—she was going to state prison for at least seven years.
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April 11 marked her 1000th day locked up without a conviction.