"Nation's Prisons Becoming Modern-Day Asylums for Mentally Ill" http://www.newsmax.com/US/prison-mental-health-inmantes/2013/09/26/id/527895 "Another mass shooting has been perpetrated by another mentally ill man who, every shred of my 20 years of experience as a forensic psychiatrist, tells me was under-treated or improperly treated," Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and Fox News contributor commented in an opinion piece following the shootings. "Psychiatry, properly focused and deployed, and properly linked to the judicial system and deployed in our V.A. hospitals, is a miraculously effective safety net for those at risk for violence toward self or others. But we seem hell bent on not focusing this healing, helping art and not deploying it." According to the Journal report, more people in need of psychiatric treatment and housing ended up on the streets after states started closing their mental institutions in the 1970s. Many of them were put in jail or, depending on crime committed, ended up in prisons. Prisoners who require medication for serious issues, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disease, are now housed as mentally ill, as are inmates who demonstrate more serious functional impairments...." I'd be curious if anyone wants to correlate the mass shootings or murder rate in general to the closing of the institutions. Also, I personally believe a lot of kids are on drugs they don't need to be, and the side effects create Columbine massacres. When did parents start giving their active kids drugs? I believe that's a fairly recent development (last few decades). In general, the amount of mentally ill in jail speaks for itself regarding other crime they commit.
The left and their media are too bust screaming for the destruction of the 2nd amendment to face the real problem. I saw a documentary awhile back that stated a "significant percentage of school shooting are perpetrated by students on or withdrawing from ADD drugs." IOW we're responsible for creating at least some of the school shootings. I think it was about the time teachers unions invented the condition known as ADD, because they're too lazy and or incompetent to deal with certain kids. I saw this in the same documentary.
Mental health facilities were prisons before the 1970's, even worse. Only when the litigators started suing did the state begin to close the so called hospitals and send them to private prisons. This passed all the liability away from the state.
Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? Race, religion, sexual orientation, class - stigmas have eroded over every major social hurdle in the past 50 years. Not so for mental illness. Something that's inherent to our genetic makeup.