Here's an excerpt from another one of my past blog posts:

"In the past, particularly before 1955 when the psychiatric deinstitutionalization started in the United States, people with grave mental illness who committed crimes were held in psychiatric institutions. These establishments were definitely far from being desirable places, but they weren’t literally jails or prisons. As the deinstitutionalization progressed over several decades, many of the circa half a million critically ill patients ended up on the street or in prison. Between the woefully underfunded Community Mental Health Act signed by President Kennedy, and the Mental Health Systems Act signed by President Carter, but later repealed under President Reagan, the deinstitutionalization has been a social experiment disaster.

To this day, the crisis continues with far too many people with mental illness incarcerated, one too many in solitary confinement, and some even on death row. Seriously ill patients in need of an in-patient care have to wait months for available space. According to the World Health Organization’s data, there are about 23.5 mental health hospital beds per 100,000 population in the US, which is roughly the same number as in Guyana. For comparison, the numbers are 52.1 in Germany and 82.4 in Czech Republic. As a person with a mental illness, I find this to be extraordinarily sad and unjust. As an American, I find it inexcusable."