ABSTRACT

In the mid 1800s, Dorothea Dix successfully lobbied for the creation of state hospitals to treat the mentally ill. As a result, the state hospital system expanded to the point that it held 559,000 patients by 1955. Correctional institutions have become de facto mental health facilities. It is time to declare the warehousing of the mentally ill in state prisons an even greater disaster and move toward reform. However, the condition of mentally ill inmates in prison was not being ignored by outside stakeholders. Recent rulings by the United States Supreme Court and investigations by Human Rights Watch, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the American Civil Liberties Union have revealed horrid cases of mistreatment of offenders living with mental illness. Correctional systems have been trying to manage the ever-increasing numbers of mentally ill inmates since the late 1980s.