The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: Deinstitutionalization and Mass Incarceration Nation

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and our failed implementation of deinstitutionalization in the 1970s is a prime example of the point. In this symposium contribution—a response to Jeffrey Bellin’s book Mass Incarceration Nation—I offer a historical account of deinstitutionalization of state mental hospitals, tracing how severely mentally ill patients were discharged from state hospitals and eventually made their way back to secure beds, but in our nation’s jails and prisons instead. Mental health and mass incarceration are not separate crises, I argue, but rather interconnected problems with an interconnected past that require an interconnected solution. The lessons of deinstitutionalization’s failures can inform how our decarceration story plays out, offering an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of our past and move toward a more just, humane, and equitable future—a future that takes the “mass” out of mass incarceration.