Hospital closures shift care into jails

Closing large public psychiatric hospitals and permanently eliminating beds creates a long‑term supply shortage of inpatient psychiatric care that cannot be reversed quickly, which in practice shifts responsibility for severe mental‑illness cases onto emergency rooms, homeless services, and the criminal‑justice system. The excerpt’s census comparisons (1955 vs 1994) illustrate how policy choices produced a persistent cohort of severely ill people living outside hospitals. — If true, this reframes debates about homelessness, mass incarceration, and public‑safety funding as downstream effects of deliberate health‑system capacity decisions, not only social or family failure.