Michigan’s prison-building spree left it unprepared for Flint’s looming mental health crisis
The state chose to imprison, rather than help, many of its mentally ill
By Asher Kohn
Hundreds of Flint children under 5 have contaminated blood due to their city’s catastrophic water mismanagement. They are at risk of developing learning disabilities and mental abnormalities. An estimated $6 million in medical care is needed immediately. The city could lose $50 billion over coming decades as it cares for residents sickened by the lead in their drinking water. This will place a severe burden on Flint, but the city might have been better equipped if Michigan hadn’t effectively swapped mental health facilities for prisons.
This is a state where mental health institutions are what the Detroit Free Press called “an underfunded disaster.” Michigan’s economic crisis has led officials to shutter 12 psychiatric hospitals since 1987. In 2010, the state had just five psychiatric beds available for every 100,000 individuals, the fourth smallest per capita capacity anywhere in the nation.
Meanwhile, the prison system has become the state’s fastest-growing industry. An estimated one in five of the 50,000 inmates in Michigan’s prison system are severely mentally ill. And corrections facilities have been the state’s fastest-growing industry since around the time officials began closing psychiatric hospitals. The prison system consumed 3% of the state budget back in 1980; by 2014 it accounted for 21%.
Things may be particularly bad in Michigan, but the transfer of mental care spending from hospitals to prisons is a long-term national trend. The three largest mental health providers in the United States are jail systems in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, according to USA Today.
The situation would likely have appalled one of the last people to have reformed mental health care at a national level: John F. Kennedy. Three weeks before his 1963 assassination, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act into law. It demystified mental health, earmarking millions of dollars towards researching childhood mental illness and funding new mental health institutions. Kennedy wanted to end what he termed “custodial” care of the nation’s mentally ill — think padded walls — and replace it with community health centers.
The act did not fare well. Richard Nixon slashed the funds distributed under the law, and Ronald Reagan replaced the money with more general health grants — a policy one professor said “satisfied special interest groups and the demands of the business community, but failed to address the issue: the treatment of mental illness.”
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