Crazy About Jail

It was a slow transition from not-quite-enough mental hospitals up to the mid-1960s to a slow national trend, all inspired as a cost-cutting measure based on false science, to shut down such facilities to the bare minimum, release mentally-ill patients onto the streets and rely on pragmatic alternatives to deal with the issues. One of the leaders in this movement to contract facilities for the mentally ill was then-California Governor, Ronald Reagan. In 1959, there were about 37,500 patients in such California hospitals… during Edmund G Brown’s gubernatorial tenure… falling to 22,000 as Reagan worked his cutbacks, a policy he carried with him to the Presidency years later.

The government’s National Institute of Corrections explains: “Mentally ill persons increasingly receive care provided by corrections agencies. In 1959, nearly 559,000 mentally ill patients were housed in state mental hospitals (Lamb, 1998). A shift to ‘deinstitutionalize’ mentally ill persons had, by the late 1990s, dropped the number of persons housed in public psychiatric hospitals to approximately 70,000 (CorrectCare, 1999). As a result, mentally ill persons are more likely to live in local communities. Some come into contact with the criminal justice system.” But where did this trend of moving the mentally ill from hospitals to the streets and jails come from?

I looked up an old New York Times piece, from October 30, 1984, to find out what theories justified such a radical change in our treatment of the mentally ill: “Dr. Robert H. Felix, who was then director of the National Institute of Mental Health and a major figure in the shift to community centers, says now on reflection: ''Many of those patients who left the state hospitals never should have done so. We psychiatrists saw too much of the old snake pit, saw too many people who shouldn't have been there and we overreacted. The result is not what we intended, and perhaps we didn't ask the questions that should have been asked when developing a new concept, but psychiatrists are human, too, and we tried our damnedest.''

“Dr. John A. Talbott, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said, 'The psychiatrists involved in the policy making at that time certainly oversold community treatment, and our credibility today is probably damaged because of it.' He said the policies 'were based partly on wishful thinking, partly on the enormousness of the problem and the lack of a silver bullet to resolve it, then as now.'

“The original policy changes were backed by scores of national professional and philanthropic organizations and several hundred people prominent in medicine, academia and politics. The belief then was widespread that the same scientific researchers who had conjured up antibiotics and vaccines during the outburst of medical discovery in the 50's and 60's had also developed penicillins to cure psychoses and thus revolutionize the treatment of the mentally ill.

“And these leaders were prodded into action by a series of scientific studies in the 1950's purporting to show that mental illness was far more prevalent than had previously been believed.

“Finally, there was a growing economic and political liability faced by state legislators. Enormous amounts of tax revenues were being used to support the state mental hospitals, and the institutions themselves were increasingly thought of as ''snake pits'' or facilities that few people wanted.” Aside from the streets, where did all those mentally-impaired people go?

We’ve just shifted the burden to total institutions less qualified to deal with these issues. Today, about 20% of those incarcerated in our jails and prisons suffer from serious mental illness. The number of people traipsing through our prisons is totally out of control; adding the mentally ill has made a bad prison situation much worse. “The United States continues to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with 5 percent of the world population, but nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.  Inmates are spending more time behind bars as [some] states [and the federal government] adopt ‘truth in sentencing laws,’ which requires inmates to serve 85 percent of their sentence behind bars.” Dean Aufderheide writing for HealthAffairs.org, April 1, 2014.

Just look at local jails, where impoverished individuals (many are struggling with mental illness and addiction) are too poor to afford even small amounts of bail or small fines (in lieu of jail time). So room and board (and even some medical care), however vile to most of us, are provided courtesy of the criminal justice system… and your friendly, local taxpayer.

“[A new] study, ‘Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,’ found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.

“The report, by the Vera Institute of Justice, comes at a time of increased attention to mass incarceration policies that have swelled prison and jail populations around the country. This week in Missouri, where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer stirred months of racial tension last year in the town of Ferguson, 15 people sued that city and another suburb, Jennings, alleging that the cities created an unconstitutional modern-day debtors’ prison, putting impoverished people behind bars in overcrowded, unlawful and unsanitary conditions.

“While most reform efforts, including early releases and the elimination of some minimum mandatory sentences, have been focused on state and federal prisons, the report found that the disparate rules that apply to jails is also in need of reform.

“‘It’s an important moment to take a look at our use of jails,’ said Nancy Fishman, the project director of the Vera Institute’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections and an author of the report. ‘It’s a huge burden on taxpayers, on our communities, and we need to decide if this is how we want to spend our resources.’

“The number of people housed in jails on any given day in the country has increased from 224,000 in 1983 to 731,000 in 2013 — nearly equal to the population of Charlotte, N.C. — even as violent crime nationally has fallen by nearly 50 percent and property crime has dropped by more than 40 percent from its peak.” New York Times, February 11^th. Our entire criminal justice system is in need of a major overhaul, from top to bottom. The poor, addicted, and mentally ill in our municipal jails represent the bottom. We cannot afford this foolishness anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the sheer numbers of people behind bars in the United States, disproportionate to anywhere else in the developed world, are statistics that tell us how very off track our criminal justice has fallen.