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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Scott has a post arguing against this connection.

Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness

What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?

Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s.

To render the argument statistically plausible it seems like you would need to both justify why the proportion of murderers who are mentally ill seems to have declined (the linked study is from Britain so you could try to see if it's different in the U.S.?) and why most of those in prison do not seem to be mentally ill according to screening surveys. Note that, though it isn't a significant part of his argument, Scott does cite the famous Rosenhan experiment which was very likely a fraud.

Associating it with "violent homeless people" specifically is more plausible. Saying it had an "extraordinary effect on crime rates" doesn't seem plausible, and that is what I was mentioning Scott's post in response to. The majority of violent crime is from career criminals. It seems very difficult to argue that deinstitutionalization was responsible for the rise in the crime rate without evidence indicating most of those additional criminals are mentally ill (and seriously enough that they would have been institutionalized).

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