| From the Freep this morning: Privately, MDOC officials acknowledge that many mentally ill inmates don't belong in prison, where security demands trump treatment needs. Over the last two decades, however, Michigan has slashed spending on in-patient treatment, leaving courts with few options but to send mentally ill offenders to jail or prison. "We don't control who comes to us," said Russ Marlan, administrator of MDOC's executive bureau. Between 1987 and 2003, Michigan closed three-quarters of its 16 state psychiatric hospitals. Michigan now provides fewer psychiatric beds per capita than all but five other states, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. County jails and state prisons have become, in effect, the state's primary mental health institutions.
This is universally true across basically all state agencies, and it is the impact of nearly 20 years of cuts in government spending and cuts in taxes for those most capable of paying them. Last year's massive tax shift from businesses -- which still consume government services (what idiot wants to argue that Chrysler didn't make prodigious use of them when it was managed into its merger with Fiat, and ought to be exempt for paying for them?) -- to individuals only represented the latest broadside in a trend that's been ongoing since the Engler years. This isn't at all different than what we described last week when noted Very Serious Person Phil Power talked about growing university student debt as a result of decades of disinvestment by state government, but that the real solution was that universities need to make peace with people who believe we can continue to cut our way to prosperity. We've tried it across the board for two decades and in our university system for four, and it not only hasn't worked but has proven to be counterproductive. Yet, our media elite continues to pretend that it's more important to compromise with inflexible lunatics than it is to just do the right thing ... which also usually also happens to be the most cost effective thing possible (i.e. giving the mentally ill necessary medication vs. incarcerating them and giving them medication occasionally, but restraining them when that's not the case). |
