Three months after a state judge issued a scathing report on the treatment of mentally ill prisoners, a national report is reaching a similar conclusion.
A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriff’s Association issued Thursday ranks South Carolina “near the bottom” in the treatment of mentally ill inmates.
The report found the state ranked near the bottom in the availability of public psychiatric beds, efforts to divert mentally ill from imprisonment, per capita spending on mental health “and almost every other measure of treatment for mentally ill individuals.”
Sorry, the streets are the “new” asylums, and have been since the back wards of the mental hospitals were closed at the insistence of the do-gooders in the early 1970’s. People who quite content with three hot meals and clean place to live and sleep were kicked out, with nowhere to go but the streets. Of course many of them ended up in prison, but many more of them remain on the streets.
Well said DP. It happened in Australia too.