ABSTRACT
In addition to interacting with public administrators and agencies in street-level encounters and as clients, customers, and public employees, individuals may be involuntarily institutionalized by the government and held as patients or inmates. Driven by the desire or need to keep the cost per day of housing prisoners very low, many became barbaric centers for punishment and incapacitation only. Rather than deviating from mainstream public administrative doctrine in the United States, the management of public institutions for confinement was very much informed by it. Increases in the nation's prison population, the costs of housing inmates, and the expense of upgrading facilities has led to steep increases in state budgets for incarceration. The complexities that administrators of public mental health facilities and prisons now face are likely to endure. The debate over the relative merits of judicial intervention in public mental health and correction policies has lost its practical force.
