Grim report: Mentally ill people are sent to jail more often than hospital.
As a result of the deinstitutionalization movement that began in the 1960s, though, “it is now extremely difficult to find a bed for a seriously mentally ill person who needs to be hospitalized,” Pavle and his co-authors write. In 1955, they write, there was one psychiatric bed for every 300 Americans. In 2005, there was one for every 3,000 Americans