Congrats. You can be the first to go, then, when DHS starts locking people up for mental illness because they are a danger to the public (and yes, they've already looked into it). Your answer strikes me as callous and flippant, and as one who has done a lot of time for a crime committed as a child, I find it offensive. The criminal mental facilities in Wisconsin are nothing but prisons, period. They are often staffed by psychology and psychiatry rejects who either lost their license in other states to practice, or should have. They are also staffed by ex-probation agents (and guess what? You don't need any training to be one! Become a PO, then retire and become a de facto sociologist, or "treatment facilitator" with none of the training and all the power to lock people away due to your own bias and prejudices), and often very crappy ones at that.

Mark Twain was right. "If you want to see the dregs of society, stand outside the gates of the local jail at the changing of the guard."

Wisconsin has three state-run mental hospitals. Sand Ridge (for sex offenders, often who are children themselves), Mendota (looks like the hospital from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and WRC (Wisconsin Resource Center) next to Dodge and Waupun. They hire only the "best," by which I mean sociologists who try to facilitate therapy groups with no training in psychology (and one, a Dr. Spotz, was barred from practicing in New Jersey for unethical behavior, but was apparently professional enough for treating mentally ill and often unstable inmates).

When you privatize prisons, you get CCA's abuses. What the hell do you think is going to happen when the prison industry privatizes "hospitals" to treat mentally ill inmates? Oh, look, a new way to lock people up using civil commitment instead of criminal statutes. And here's the best part: the SSA shares information openly with DHS, and the DHS shares it with law enforcement, so if law enforcement decides they don't like you (like if you happen to piss off a cop who is friends with a DA), it's off to the farm with you after they hold a kangaroo trial with a public pretender who doesn't give a crap about your inalienable rights.

Wisconsin is very much a prison-industry state, with a monopolistic control over the companies allowed to sell basic things to prisoners. JL Marcus is owned by the wife of an ex-governor (it was either them or Keefe, I forget which). Tell me that's not a conflict of interest. And let's not forget that the guard union was so powerful in Wisconsin that the current governor had to essentially break their backs by busting up the union. And here's something that never made into the media, but I heard straight from the horse's mouth (a guard): It was part of their union rules that prison administrative officials could not randomly UA guards, with the result that guards routinely came in drunk, or high, and then took out their own mess on inmates, causing all kinds of security issues. Let's not forget Officer Hall, who got busted in Racine Correctional Institution smuggling in pounds of pot, and even had jars labeled "inmates." Or how about in Waupun, where a guard was fired upward to a desk job in Madison after the feds busted him stealing garbage bags full of inmate mail, and cashing the checks, and keeping the money that family would send in to their loved ones. Not to mention the garage full of stolen inmate property like tv's, shoes, radios, guitars, typewriters, fans, and more.

That is the reality the public doesn't see. It's not politically expedient to treat prisoners humanely.

I have one thing to say about that:

"The level of civilization within a society can be judged by the way they treat their prisoners." --Doestoyevsky