Jails:
America's Mental Institutions
From Minnesota Public Radio
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CONTENTS:
Introduction
A
Visit to Jail
Locked
Up and Psychotic
From
the Street to Jail, and Back
What
to Do?
In the early 1840's, crusading prison
reformer Dorothea Dix wrote a scathing report to the
Massachusetts legislature:
I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to
call your attention to the state of Insane Persons
confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets,
cellars, stalls, pens: Chained, naked, beaten with rods,
and lashed into obedience!
Dix argued that the many insane people in
Massachusetts jails and almshouses did not belong there;
they should be placed in more humane institutions
designed just for them. Massachusetts and other states
responded. Dix's campaign led to the construction of
some 30 new mental institutions. Forty years after she
started her campaign, the 1880 United States Census said
99% of the nation's 'insane persons' lived at home or in
asylums. Only a few hundred were in jail. That was the
practice in the US for the next century: mentally ill
people who couldn't cope on their own were confined in
mental hospitals. Most never had the chance to live
freely in society—or to get in trouble there.
That has changed. Last year the U.S.
Justice Department said 280,000 people with serious
mental illnesses were in jail or prison—more than four
times the number in state mental hospitals. American
RadioWorks Correspondent John Biewen explores why...
Next: A
Visit to Jail
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