Ernest Drucker

“In addition to including the voices of those most affected by mass incarceration in the conversation about ending it, we must pay attention to lessons from an earlier era of deinstitutionalization: that of mental hospitals in the second half of the twentieth century. It is crucial that we not repeat the experiences of the dismantling of that system - a system that at peak was of a scale on par with mass incarceration, affecting about 700 per 100,000 adults in the U.S. population. Deinstitutionalization of millions of mental hospital patients took place beginning in the 1950s and lasting through the 1970s, by which time more than 95 percent of all U.S. mental hospital patients had been discharged, and most of the large institutions that warehoused them had been shut down. That earlier process (also called 'decarceration' at the time) was publicly presented as a progressive initiative to get people out of the medieval conditions of many old mental hospitals. At the time, the plan was for mental health services and care to be rendered through community-based programs. Unfortunately, those programs never materialized due to the budgetary demands of the Vietnam War and the death of President John F. Kennedy, who had driven the initiative from the start. The earlier failure of public policy affected many of the same populations we see in prisons today, where about 50 percent of inmates carry major mental health diagnoses. We must certainly insist that prison decarceration not repeat the wholesale abandonment of follow-up care that occurred after the earlier decarceration.”
― Ernest Drucker, Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health