Lordkill posted... This is what happens when you don't use the death penalty properly and shut down the mental institutions....
People already covered you lie about the death penalty, I'll cover your lie about mental institutions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/05/truth-about-deinstitutionalization/618986/
Its not the case that the majority of people with mental illness were suddenly on the streets when institutions closed: Even in 1950, only about a third of people with mental illness were living in psychiatric hospitals and other facilities. More than half already lived in communities, with family or on their own.
Furthermore, the vast majority of incarcerated people with mental illness belong to a subset of the population that likely would never have been served by state psychiatric hospitals in the past. State-hospital patients were largely white and middle-aged or older, and divided roughly evenly between men and women; todays incarcerated population is largely young, male, and not white. (More than half of the U.S. prison population are people of color.) One study suggests that closing the state psychiatric facilities increased the incarcerated population by less than 10 percent.
So what accounts for the extraordinary levels of mental illness we see in our jails and prisons? In large part, the sheer number of incarcerated people. In a July 1971 press conference, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, calling drug abuse Americas public enemy number one and setting the stage for tough-on-crime policies. These laws, like mandatory minimum sentences for possession and other drug-related crimes, disproportionately affected people of color and pushed incarceration rates to record levels. Between 1972 and 2009, the prison population alone grew 700 percent.