The mentally ill are being warehoused in jails and prisons. In 1999, the Department of Justice reported that 16 percent of the population of state jails and prisons, more than 260,000 individuals, suffer from severe mental illnesses. Increasingly police are acting as front line mental health workers when a person with mental illness is in crisis. By 1998 this number increased to 24,787.
Police encounters with persons with mental illness are often deadly.
In 1999, there were 30 episodes recorded in newspapers in which law enforcement officers killed a person with mental illness. More effective anti-psychotic treatments, legal decisions protecting the civil rights of the mentally ill and especially the economic opportunity to shift costs from state to the federal government have resulted in fewer than 60,000 patients hospitalized today in public settings, down from over 500,000 forty years ago. Closure of state hospitals has not resulted in adequate resources transferred to communities for outpatient care. Untreated patients and changing standards for involuntary hospitalization have led to homelessness and criminalization of the mentally ill. Studies show that individuals who are in treatment are no more violent than the general public but studies also show that individuals with severe mental illnesses who are not being treated have more risk for violent behavior.