If we don’t lock up and treat the mentally ill, we’ll continue to pay a deadly price

[mountaineer]

If we don’t lock up and treat the mentally ill, we’ll continue to pay a deadly price
By Stephen Eide   
Published April 19, 2026, 3:13 p.m. ET
New York Post

... On the whole, 2025 was a historically great one for public safety. Murders and crime overall dropped nationwide. But in too many cases, ideology, incompetence and unaccountability defined our government’s response to mental illness-related violence in America. And, in the worst cases, made “by reason of insanity” a perverse get-out-of-jail-free card that puts them back on the streets.

Law professors will tell you that a classic verdict of “not guilty for reason of insanity” is rarely used successfully. States put restrictions on that legal maneuver after John Hinckley shot President Reagan in 1981. Hinckley’s lawyers got him off on an insanity plea, provoking widespread outrage. ...

With mentally ill offenders, the George Soros crowd asserts that the typical case shouldn’t be seen as bad, and in need of punishment, but rather mad, and in need of treatment.

Diverting mentally ill offenders into treatment can succeed with small-scale programs exercising vigilant supervision. Mass scale diversion will never work, though. ...

Bipartisan failure created the bed shortage. Democrats fear the wrath of disability rights activists who frame even minor investments in inpatient capacity as a slippery slope towards a mass roundup of neurodivergent Americans. And Republicans blanch at the price tag of expanding institutional care, an admittedly expensive but also necessary and humane mode of treatment.  ...

[libertybele]

The mentally ill need to be treated in a humane manner.  Many are on the streets, so identifying individuals as mentally unstable and getting them into treatment is going to be difficult.  Who is going to determine their mental stability??  Usually they are identified once a crime is committed and then they are incarcerated anyways.  So ... depending on  the crime ..... treatment and rehabilitation is necessary.  I don't believe that is the protocol, I believe they are incarcerated, made to do their time and released.

The same protocol is used for drug offenders; they do their time and then let back out on the streets with no rehabilitation or treatment so it becomes and revolving door for the offenders.

It really is a sad state of affairs and one that will take a significant amount of work to make laws that can effectively deal with mental illness.  Taking them off the streets and then throwing away the key to me is not an option.