From The Atlantic: “Carlos and Christian weren’t just unlucky. They’re representative of a decades-long pattern of filling up jails with ‘mentally ill’ people. When policy makers began closing state-run psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, they promised to replace them with localized mental-health care—but in most places the funding and political will required to make this happen never materialized, leaving large swaths of the U.S. without any options for those seeking treatment. A conservative estimate says 900,000 people with ‘mental illness’ end up in our jails every year. ‘These are people who are not necessarily intending to perform criminal acts,’ Christine Montross, a psychiatrist and author of Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, told me.
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