Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jails
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2018
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Eide joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss how America's health-care system fails the mentally ill, and the steps that cities and states are taking to keep the mentally ill out of jail and get them into treatment.
Urban areas have seen a disturbing rise in street disorder and homelessness over the last decade. Unfortunately, many of the street homeless suffer from serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Despite federalspending of about $150 billion annually on mental illness programs, individuals with the most severe diagnoses areoften thrown into a repeating cycle of jail stays, homelessness, and hospitalizations.
In response, many states and cities are developing their own methods to keep the severely mentally ill out of jail.Launched in 2000, Miami-Dade County's Criminal Mental Health Project is one of the nation's most admired and successful of these programs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're back with another edition of 10 blocks. This is your host, Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal. |
| 0:24.1 | People in big cities around the country regularly encounter individuals who are clearly troubled and often seriously mentally ill. |
| 0:32.8 | Despite decades of work and attention to the issue, our society has not yet come up with an effective |
| 0:39.0 | way to treat the mentally ill in a humane manner. In fact, many of these people wind up getting |
| 0:44.8 | arrested, either for minor or serious crimes, and then cycle in and out of the jail system, |
| 0:51.5 | which has become the nation's de facto mental health treatment facility. |
| 0:56.0 | I'm joined now by Stephen Eyde, senior fellow at Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to |
| 1:02.3 | Citigernel. He writes frequently on the intersecting issues of mental illness and homelessness |
| 1:08.4 | and has a piece in the current issue of City Journal entitled |
| 1:12.0 | Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail. |
| 1:15.2 | Hi, Steve. |
| 1:15.9 | Thanks for joining us. |
| 1:17.6 | Hey, Seth, so nice of you to have me on. |
| 1:20.0 | So, Steve, why is this a problem? |
| 1:24.3 | Why aren't the mentally ill in mental hospitals? |
| 1:29.2 | Well, that's the way that we used to do it. |
| 1:31.8 | When we talk about the public mental health care system, |
| 1:35.4 | what the government does to help the mentally ill, |
| 1:37.6 | it used to do that in only one way. |
| 1:39.5 | Up until the 1950s, we ran these massive mental asylums, mental institutions that housed hundreds of |
| 1:48.9 | thousands of people. |
| 1:50.2 | For various reasons, we decided to phase that system out into through a process known as |
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