NYT: Shutting the Insane Asylums Didn’t Fail, It Just Wasn’t Tried Hard Enough
10th October 2022
Steve Sailer points and laughs.
Ever since the first half of 2020, when pandemic fears and the racial reckoning led to the releasing of prisoners and the decline of policing, dangerous lunatics have been running amok. This has led to calls to finally rebuild the asylum system that long ago removed vicious crazy men from the streets.
One of the many reformers to come out of Massachusetts in the 1840s was Dorothea Dix. She made her cause better treatment of lunatics, whose triumph led to the construction of publicly-funded insane asylums, typically in restful surroundings.
For example, Los Angeles’s mentally ill were served by the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in a serene location in a superb climate a few miles from the Pacific. After his 1946 drug freakout led to him spending six months at Camarillo, Charlie Parker did not at all appreciate his record company naming his comeback track “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.” But still …