I'm not opposed to dangerous, violent, out-of-control people being kept under lock and key, but ...
I lived in Mendocino County in the 1970's when all of the California state mental hospitals were shut down including the rural Mendocino State Hospital. They just opened all the doors and the front gate and told everyone to leave. That was what they did.
People just went out and wandered around. People who had been locked up for years and decades began to inhabit the local landscape with no place to go, no idea what to do, and no way to support themselves.
I knew some of those people because I worked for public transit at the time and I talked to them. My favorite customer was a former state hospital detainee who had been committed in the 1950's and had no idea why. There's no telling what had happened to him while committed for decades but he became my friend and was a sweet and gentle man I saw every day.
There was never public accounting for what these 'hospitals' did to/for their inmates. After MSH emptied it was left abandoned and unlocked, I used to ride my bike out there and peek into the buildings ... grim does not begin to describe the interior chamber of some of those buildings :/
Mendocino State Hospital has also been implicated in the MKUltra program and was staffed by many members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. It is not possible to get into those state hospital records as they were sealed for 75 years at the time of closure.
We have to be very careful about not repeating the same mistakes we made in the past under the banner of Lock Em Up because they're crazy.
I'm not opposed to dangerous, violent, out-of-control people being kept under lock and key, but ...
I lived in Mendocino County in the 1970's when all of the California state mental hospitals were shut down including the rural Mendocino State Hospital. They just opened all the doors and the front gate and told everyone to leave. That was what they did.
People just went out and wandered around. People who had been locked up for years and decades began to inhabit the local landscape with no place to go, no idea what to do, and no way to support themselves.
I knew some of those people because I worked for public transit at the time and I talked to them. My favorite customer was a former state hospital detainee who had been committed in the 1950's and had no idea why. There's no telling what had happened to him while committed for decades but he became my friend and was a sweet and gentle man I saw every day.
There was never public accounting for what these 'hospitals' did to/for their inmates. After the hospital emptied it was left abandoned and unlocked, I used to ride my bike out there and peek into the buildings ... grim does not begin to describe the interior chamber of some of those buildings :/
Mendocino State Hospital has also been implicated in the MKUltra program and was staffed by many members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. It is not possible to get into those state hospital records as they were sealed for 75 years at the time of closure.
We have to be very careful about not repeating the same mistakes we made in the past under the banner of Lock Em Up because they're crazy.