The Story of Mental Illness in One Graph

Discovery Fellow Robert Marbut provides this telling graph on the correlation of falling support for psychiatric beds and the rise of the mentally ill population in prison. Deinstitutionalization since the ‘60’s went overboard and helped create the current crisis. 

A federal judge just fined the State of Washington 100 million dollars for its protracted neglect of mentally ill prisoners in Washington jails. 

The new sanitariums, as former Discovery Fellow Chris Rufo observed, are the street, the emergency room and the jail. This is somebody’s idea of progress?