Deinstitutionalization In Canada

In an effort to transform the public mental health system, in 1963, President Kennedy proposed the Community Mental Health Act. It was the first among several federal initiatives to create a community mental health care system. Once the act was ratified, there was an intense deterioration in institutionalization, otherwise known as “deinstitutionalization”, and by 1980 there was a 75% declined of the inpatient population at many public psychiatric hospitals. In 2000, there was less than 10% of the public institutionalized just fifty years earlier. In 2009, there was even a more dramatic shift among children and adolescence whereby there was a 98% decline in

In the video, “The New Asylums”, it demonstrated how deinstitutionalization has left thousands of mentally ill patients in the hands of the prison system. As the mental health hospitals closed down, the police department and prison system has become responsible for the mentally ill people that are on the streets. There was a firm point made about the release of mentally ill patients- “When hundreds of thousands of mentally ill are released, they do not magically become healthy. They went to the streets, became homeless, and turned to a system that cannot say no.” The video also stated that today, there are nearly 500,000 mentally ill people being held in jails and prisons throughout the country. Furthermore, there was no safety net for those

With states closing many of its mental facilities in the communities, there were a lot of people in need of outpatient care who fell through the cracks of the system and ended up in prison. Prison is where many of them died from inadequate treatment. Prisons were suddenly receiving inmates with the following types of mental illnesses: Schizophrenia, bipolar, and deep depressions. These prisons just did not provide these inmates with any medication during their incarceration. Because the community based health services is lacking, and patients aren’t receiving sufficient outpatient care, it makes the effectiveness of deinstitutionalization a serious problem. Without the availability of 24/7 psychiatric services that are well structured, I believe that deinstitutionalization is what is accounting for the increase of the mentally ill inmates in the correctional facility.

Deinstitutionalization further exacerbated the situation because, once the public psychiatric beds had been closed, they were not available for people who later became mentally ill, and this situation continues up to the present.

The continued decline is a result of the Canadian state’s political ambition for First Nation assimilation. (The police institutions are not at fault since they have a obligation to enforce and protect the Canadian state.)

In 1955, over 559,000 individuals resided in inpatient psychiatric hospitals. By 1995, however, the number had drastically diminished to 69,000, (National Health Policy Forum, 2000). This drastic reduction was largely due to the discovery of antipsychotic medications in the 1950s, and the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s, wherein several thousands of mentally ill individuals were released from psychiatric institutions to return to their communities for treatment. Mental health centers (MHCs) were conceptualized during deinstitutionalization to provide treatment to these newly-released mentally ill persons in their communities. Although efforts were well-intended, the MHCs failed to serve the

The theory of ‘deinstitutionalization’ began arising with the theory of providing more freedom to the mentally ill and less spending on full time care facilities. The widespread use of drugs to control the mentally ill in the 1900s led to a mass release of patients and an emptying of asylums. Outpatient Psychiatric Clinics were established. Case Law in the United States began to be generated to provide the mentally ill with greater rights. Shelton v. Tucker 1960 provided that the mentally ill should receive care in the “least restrictive alternative”, which is a practice still utilized. O’Connor v. Donaldson 1975 ruled that non-dangerous mental patients have the right to be treated or discharged if they have been institutionalized against their will. This new approached permitted the mass exodus

The field of police work is constantly being forced to develop and improve its protocols, procedures, and practices in an effort to keep pace with the ever-changing society in which it operates and criminal behavior it seeks to eradicate. While the history of policing has been marked by substantial changes throughout time, the work of modern-day police officers and officials demonstrate some of the most substantial adaptations to its surrounding environment that the field has ever seen. In order to understand where the future of policing is heading, it is important to first understand these current trends that are affecting the current landscape of the profession. By

Jails have been described as “de facto mental hospitals” because they have filled the void created when state psychiatric hospitals began closing in the early 1960s through a process known as deinstitutionalization. Supporters of deinstitutionalization thought the process would help individuals suffering from a mental illness live more self-reliantly while being treated by community mental health programs. However, the federal government did not provide the necessary funding to meet the mounting demand for these programs, leaving numerous untreated. Individuals with serious mental illnesses are often poor or homeless and are likely to have substance abuse problems. Therefore, when they are left untreated, they are more likely to commit minor crimes that have been the focus of law enforcement in recent years (H. Richard Lamb and Linda Weinberger).

As long as there are people who engage in suspected criminal activity, there will always be the police with whom they will have an encounter. Good, bad or indifferent there will always be these questions that will need to be answered; were the police legally justified in the way they approached and carried out their encounter with the suspect? And, were there any exigent circumstances involved during the encounter? The following answers these questions.

The "crisis" of policing elsewhere is essentially about the failure of relationships, particularly with people who are different, culturally and socially to the dominant group or class in society. The crisis is also about the development of policing in a technocratic and paramilitary direction which served to isolate the police from the community, and lead to a reliance on the patrol-car and the computer rather than on face on face contact with the people.16 Policing thus became alienated from the people it aimed to serve. Basically the police-community relationship is a form of inter-group relations, as both police and community regard each other as identifiable groups with specific

The idea that the police are basically a crime-fighting agency has never been challenged, no one has troubled to sort out the remaining priorities. Instead, the police have always been forced to justify activities that did not involve law enforcement, in the direct sense, either by linking them constructively to law enforcement or by defining them as nuisance demands for service. This view, especially in the minds of the police, has two pernicious consequences,. First, it leads to a tendency to view all sorts of problems as if they involve culpable offenses and to an excessive reliance on quasi-legal methods for handling them. The widespread use of arrests without intent to prosecute exemplifies this state of affairs. These studies do not involve

It’s important to address the issues police agency’s faces on a regular. Police agencies have a number of problems with controlling racial profiling, maintaining acceptable recruiting and retaining a skilled workforce, and reducing community violence. These factors are extremely indurate. However, the issues can be resolved. Law enforcement officers often force to face negative stereotyping. Nevertheless, police agency 's are able to overcome such an obstacle. There exists a growing sentiment in many communities about the badness of all cops J. Tyler, D. (n.d.). Police agencies are forced to deal with the struggle of defeating trust issues with the community. Police have experienced problems with recruiting and selecting applicants. Since September 11, 2001, the problem has become more acute, as a military reserve call-ups and an expanding police role strain agency resources across the country A. Tangel, W. (2004) . Reducing crime has always been very hard for police to tackle, it’s very hard to measure the performance of law enforcement agencies. Throughout the next three decades, “traditional” measures of police agency performance became entrenched within the policing profession with little debate and little fanfare R. Maguire, E. (2010). However, again there are numbers of solutions for these issues. One good, useful solution would to be get more money for the law enforcement that would be embarkation. Law enforcers will be able to assist with training and

The increasing levels of reported crimes of violence in society today, and in particular the increasing incidence of the use of firearms in crime, give us all cause for concern. Policing is an integral component of our communities, so how the Police deal with this changing dynamic will influence not only serious crime, but also future public perception of policing as we know it.

The twenty-first century viewed policing from a new perspective. The cause of crime and turmoil often initiate from outside of the community involved, prompting new innovative measures from law enforcement. Street crimes committed by outside perpetrators require close surveillance and