The Truth About Deinstitutionalization
When a person has a mental-health crisis in America, it is almost always law enforcement—not a therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist—who responds to the 911 call. But most officers aren’t adequately trained to deal with mental-health emergencies. And while laws intended to protect civil liberties make it exceedingly difficult to hospitalize people against their will, it is remarkably easy to arrest them.
As a result, policing and incarceration have effectively replaced emergency mental-health care, especially in low-income communities of color. In many jails, the percentage of people with mental illness has continued to go up even as the jail population has dropped. Today, nearly half the people in U.S. jails and more than a third of those in U.S. prisons have been diagnosed with a mental illness, compared to about a fifth in the general population.
When the justice system steps into mental-health care, the results are often deadly. According to a , nearly one-quarter of fatal police shootings involve a person with mental illness. Once inside a jail or prison, the mental-health care a person receives from inadequate to abusive; suicide rates are . America’s criminal-justice system has a mental-illness crisis, and to fix it
