The Tragedy of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny: If not for America’s prohibition on involuntary commitment, they would probably have never met.

Statistical highlight regarding psychiatric commitment.

>From the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, public asylum populations shrank by nearly 75% to just 150,000 patients, even as the country’s population exploded. Meanwhile, America’s homeless population ballooned to more than 300,000, as its prison population increased exponentially. And while the statistical relationship between deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration is unclear, people suffering from severe mental illness are, in fact, [more likely to commit violent crimes](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-case-for-forcing-the-mentally-ill-into-treatment.html), and our current revolving-door setup does very little to meaningfully deter people from that path. Certainly, some of those who might’ve received treatment on the basis of involuntary commitment, and eventually become well as a result, would be less likely to commit criminally violent acts in the future. As the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey [pointed out in the 1990s](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html#55), police have, since the closing of public institutions, routinely used disorderly conduct charges to pick up mentally ill individuals on almost purely humanitarian grounds.