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juliaoceania -> RE: It's Reagan's Fault!!! (12/9/2006 9:41:29 AM)
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Reagan did this first when he was governor of California, it was one of the reasons why my mom voted for him his first term but refused to support him a second term. She is old enough to remember this issue all too well and that is the only reason I know about it. I googled his record in California and came up with this link originally published in the SF Chronicle
quote:
Prisons and jails have become, in effect, California's hospitals of last resort for the mentally ill. An estimated 30,000 mentally ill people are behind bars at any given time. Each night a person spends in jail costs taxpayers three times the dollars needed to treat a patient with medication in a residential care facility.
How did it get to be this way?
The short answer is 'deinstitutionalization.' During the 1960s, many people began accusing the state mental hospitals of violating the civil rights of patients. Some families did, of course, commit incorrigible teenagers or eccentric relatives to years of involuntary confinement and unspeakable treatment. Nurse Ratched, the sadistic nurse famously portrayed in the book and film 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,' became a symbol of institutional indifference to the mentally ill.
By the late 1960s, the idea that the mentally ill were not so different from the rest of us, or perhaps were even a little bit more sane, became trendy. Reformers dreamed of taking the mentally ill out of the large institutions and housing them in smaller, community-based residences where they could live more productive and fulfilling lives.
In 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS), which went into effect in 1969 and quickly became a national model. Among other things, it prohibited forced medication or extended hospital stays without a judicial hearing.
A mental patient could be held for 72 hours only if he or she engaged in an act of serious violence or demonstrated a likelihood of suicide or an inability to provide their own food, shelter or clothing due to mental illness. But 72 hours was rarely enough time to stabilize someone with medication. Only in extreme cases could someone be held another two weeks for evaluation and treatment.
As a practical matter, involuntary commitment was no longer a plausible option.
http://www.psychlaws.org/generalResources/article45.htm
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