When I was arrested in Arizona in the middle of a psychotic breakdown, I was immediately taken to jail, rather than a mental hospital, which is where I should have gone. A month later I was arrested in Ohio, and in that case I was taken to a mental hospital. In the first case, I did not get better. In the second case, I was finally able to get the help I needed, my condition began to stabilize and I was able to remain stable from that point forward. What I didn’t understand at the time was that for a majority of the country, jail has become the de facto housing facility for the mentally ill. Cuts to mental health budgets throughout the country have created a status quo where not only are millions of people in the United States in jail, but the majority of them suffer from a mental illness. In a study released in 2006, the Department of Justice estimated that fully 64 percent of local jail inmates have some form of mental illness. In reality the number is probably higher. This is all the result of policies that have weakened or even removed large parts of the mental health commitment system, enacted primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, largely during the Ronald Reagan presidency. The consequences for this are far reaching. Higher murder and assault rates, higher property crime rates, higher rates of drug abuse, and lost productivity of the many people whose lives are destroyed by mental illness.
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