Prison fact of the day

by on March 20, 2007 at 2:04 pm in Data Source | Permalink

Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68

Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75

Percentage today who are in prisons: 97

That is from Harper’s Index, April 2007 issue.

anne March 20, 2007 at 2:18 pm

Wow. Seems like there’s a certain percentage of folks that just go haywire. Wonder if the response will eventually change the statistic (I suspect not), or if it just plain doesn’t matter what “treatment” option we use. What a horror all the way around. Any statistics on what proportion of this approximately .7 percent are long term or have been re-institutionalized into prisons or mental hospitals?

John Payne March 20, 2007 at 2:57 pm

Is there any distinction made between the number of people in mental institutions in the 50s who were there voluntarily and those who were compelled to be there?

brianS March 20, 2007 at 3:30 pm

Wow is right. Although following Christopher Monnier’s comment, I’d venture to guess that the “incarceration” rate means something quite different today.

does the “institutionalization” rate of yore include only “mental hospital” commitments/incarcerations or does it include the variety of “institutionalized” people of yore that now are often “mainstreamed”?

Here’s a link to a slightly dated http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html“>Christian Science Monitor article on comparative incarceration rates. One in 37 adults in prison as of 2003, highest rate in the world. Here’s another link, to an Olin Working Paper on “From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution” that looks interesting.

from the abstract of the latter:
“When the data on mental hospitalization are combined with the data on imprisonment for the period 1928 through 2000, the incarceration revolution of the late twentieth century barely reaches the level of institutionalization that the United States experienced at mid-century. The highest rate of aggregated institutionalization during the entire century occurred in 1955 when almost 640 persons per 100,000 adults over the age 15 were institutionalized in asylums, mental hospitals, and state and federal prisons. In addition, the trend line for aggregated institutionalization reflects a mirror image of the national homicide rate during the same period. Using a Prais-Winsten regression model that corrects for autocorrelation in time-series data, and holding constant three leading structural covariates of homicide, this paper finds a large, statistically significant, and robust relationship between aggregated institutionalization and homicide. “

mobile March 20, 2007 at 4:22 pm

I, for one, am proud of the strides society in improving the mental health of its population and increasing the efficiency of its criminal justice system!

Brant March 20, 2007 at 4:35 pm

Drugs I: War on Drugs puts people in prison.

Drugs II: Drugs sold by pharmacists keep people out of asylums.

KCinDC March 20, 2007 at 5:50 pm

Not only that, but some of the people who would have been institutionalized in 1953 are on the streets now. What would the statistics look like if the homeless were included as a category? The 0.67-0.68 match is just a coincidence.

Peter March 20, 2007 at 9:50 pm

Could many of the people in mental hospitals in the 1950′s actually have been elderly people with dementia? Today most people like that are in nursing homes, but IINM nursing homes weren’t too common before the 1960′s.

joan March 21, 2007 at 12:15 am

Could it be that the advances in medicine that decreased the number of people in mental institutions made resources avalible to lock up the next most irritating segment of the population? If a drug were developed that cures drug addiction would the prison population decrease or would more behaviors be defined as serious crimes meriting long prison terms?

jult52 March 21, 2007 at 9:27 am

BrianS: thanks for the interesting post.

brianS March 21, 2007 at 12:11 pm

America became more focused on personal liberty in the 1960s, so we stopped locking up most crazy people. Unfortunately, the new ethos of do-your-own-thing liberty also led to a huge growth in the crime rate

Interesting thoughts, Steve Sailer. However, I think one should be careful about general claims of fundamental changes in social mores that happen to coincide with changes in the age distribution of the adult population.

The arrival of the front end of the baby boom into adulthood correlates pretty well with the “Summer of Love,” the anti-war movement and the rise in the homicide rate.

The US homicide rate was relatively low during 1940-1964. Early in this period, a relatively large share of young males in the US were in military uniform, a close neighbor to being “institutionalized”. Then they came home to make babies in an era of significant out-migration from rural areas into urban ones as agriculture became increasingly mechanized.

Another, somewhat tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the data Harcourt presents in his Figure 2 is an “institutional” one. Namely, during periods of unified Democratic party control of the national government (1933-46, 1949-52, 1961-68, 1977-80, 1993-94), homicide rates are lower or declining than under divided government (1931-32, 1947-48, 1969-76, 1981-92, 1995-2000) or unified Republican party control (1928-30). [I'm using a highly sophisticated, interocular pressure test here]

mpowell March 22, 2007 at 4:56 pm

I’m not sure what Tyler intends by presenting this data, but if his implication is the obvious one, that we have moved people from mental institutions to prison, that would be pretty irresponsible. The data presented doesn’t prove anything.

32rrfrtg October 8, 2007 at 2:14 am
joinoiwe November 30, 2007 at 3:49 am

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likaida March 17, 2009 at 1:58 am
likaida March 17, 2009 at 1:59 am
likaida March 17, 2009 at 2:04 am
likaida March 17, 2009 at 2:08 am

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