State prisons/county jails house 10X more Americans with mental illness than psychiatric hospitals

The CrimeReport

In 1975 the Supreme Court dealt a final blow to a broken state hospital system by severely restricting the ability of government to confine citizens involuntarily simply for being mentally ill.

Four decades later, there are few mental health experts who would argue that the deinstitutionalization movement was wrong in principle. But most now acknowledge that the shortsighted reforms of the 1960s and 1970s – and the corresponding lack of community support and investment – was a recipe for disaster that funneled tens of thousands of Americans who lived in deplorable conditions in state psychiatric facilities to even more deplorable conditions in the nation's jails and prisons.

“If you set out to design the absolute most expensive and worst way to address mental illness you would do it in a jail setting,” said John Snook, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC).

Snook spoke during a panel discussion yesterday at the National Criminal Justice Association conference in Philadelphia that focused on innovative strategies for addressing what by all accounts is a runaway public health crisis.

“This a problem that is rapidly increasing and we are only just getting a handle on it,” he said. ”and if we don't solve it we are going to look back in 20 years and wonder how things got so bad.”

It's estimated that roughly 1.5 million people with severe psychiatric conditions are arrested every year, and that more than 350,000 of them are currently languishing in the nation's jails and prisons.

State prisons and county jails house ten times more mentally ill Americans than state psychiatric hospitals, according to a report released last month by TAC, and the total number of inmates suffering from mental illness continues to grow.

Many were arrested for minor offenses, and are housed in conditions that are medically unsound while placing a severe financial burden on the municipalities tasked with caring for them.

With the support of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, researchers and policy makers are beginning to identify early intervention strategies that can identify at-risk individuals before they are arrested and provide a continuum of care. [MORE]