In 1955 the United States held 558,239 people in psychiatric hospitals, about 340 beds for every 100,000 people. The promise of deinstitutionalization was community care. The funding never came at scale.
As the hospitals emptied, jails and prisons filled. Near 1980 the two lines met at roughly 100,000 each. By 2024 about 60,000 hospital beds remained, near 11 per 100,000, while an estimated 378,000 to 400,000 people with serious mental illness were held behind bars. The three largest psychiatric facilities in America are now jails.
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