Does cutting mental health care increase the prison population?

The Washington Post, Suzy Khimm, 06/02/2011 Reposted at darkestcloset.bloggerspot.com

State-supported mental health care, like many social services, has been especially vulnerable in the recent rounds of budget cuts. Over the past two years, some $1.6 billion has been slashed from non-Medicaid state spending on mental health, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But a growing number of law enforcement officials - along with mental health advocates - are voicing concerns that such cutbacks not only hurt mental health beneficiaries but also overburden the country's prison system.

Supreme Court Orders California to Reduce Prison Population

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that California must reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates, citing conditions that violate the Eight Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.” Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” (The New York Times, 5/24/11)