Marc Levin: Mental Illness and the Texas Criminal Justice System

Here's the report from Texas Public Policy Foundation, Center for Effective Justice.

The relationship between crime and mental illness has always been complex. Contemporary attitudes and knowledge concerning the treatment of mental illness indicate the urgent need for careful restudy and reshaping of this relationship.
Reformers in the late 1960s and early 1970s pressed successfully for deemphasizing institutional care, which they contended often led to abuse of patients. Their idea was that patients could function in society with supervised reliance on medications for the control of erratic, sometimes anti-social, behavior. In the 1950s mental institutions housed three times as many patients as prisons held convicts. Both populations, at that, were small by current standards. Throughout the U.S. today, prison inmates total more than 2 million, compared with only 338,029 in 1970. General population growth is partly responsible; even more significant factors are increased crime and tougher sentencing laws. In Texas, the prison population is 13 times larger than in 1970—12,000 back then vs. more than 157,000 today.
Particularly striking is the recent estimate that “deinstitutionalization”—the release of mental patients into the general population —now accounts for up to 14 percent of the growth in incarceration. Today, eight times as many mentally ill persons are admitted into prisons and jails as mental hospitals.
Mentally ill offenders also contribute to the probation and parole caseloads. Texas has a significant percent of offenders with mental illness throughout its prison, probation, and parole systems.
Mental illness also has a substantial impact on county jails. Of the 1 million offenders jailed every year, 17 percent are former MHMR clients. Some 20 percent of Harris County Jail inmates receive medications for mental illness.
Here's the rest of the story from Texas Public Policy Foundation, Center for Effective Justice.