America is caught in a vicious cycle.
Whenever claiming that confining mentally ill persons to prisons and jails was inhumane, led to the nation’s first psychiatric ward at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia in 1752 and the nation’s first psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, VA in In the 1800’s movements exposing pervasive and appalling treatment and conditions in the nation’s state prisons and county jails led to a widespread acceptance that individuals with mental illness belonged in hospitals, as early as the 1700’s, in summary voices of protest in the colonies.
By 1880, 75 public psychiatric hospitals existed in our young nation. Then, treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia based non profit group that promotes access to mental health care, chronicles America’s history of the issue. While using jails and prisons to warehouse individuals with mental illness, we have returned to colonial era modalities. Oftentimes in the 1960’s and 70’s, deinstitutionalization, the government’s movement to reduce the nation’s state psychiatric hospital population, prompted a return to an era of prison asylums.
While receiving services through special programs, so this policy cited as its impetus that it was inhumane to keep individuals locked up in hospitals, often times under unacceptable, even abusive conditions, and that people should be better served and experience a better quality of life living in the community.