Painful as this problem is to all connected with the individuals involved, in business this would be called a market shift. Dismantling a huge mental health hospitalization system during my lifetime meant that people who demonstrate deviant behavior threatening themselves and/or others have been incarcerated in a different institution.
Enormous implications flow from this shift within our society, not the least of which is the number of people who are homeless. Apparently these have not been counted by the author.
"According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year. Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt, bed by bed,? an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance. After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan. What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and '?50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates,? only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new."
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