

Ending asylums began long before Regan
Regan ramped up funneling them into prisons, which is basically why the Kirk quote is disingenuous bullshit. Can supportive rehabilitative programs be the answer, even if they’re involuntary and potentially lifelong? Maybe. But that’s not what happens a lot of the time. American politicians, especially republicans, continually push to either limit funding as much as possible, end, or privatize (which only works for the more lucrative things like drug and alcohol and disability services and even those are widely considered to suffer under private equity). Of course, their solution for “end” is throw them to the wolves, which in practice means homelessness, crime, increasing drug use, etc and eventually prison when those things disrupt communities. Kirk wasn’t an idiot. He’s like Newsom, he knew the most likely place these people end up is prison and he didn’t care bc he saw them as subhuman scum
The fact of the matter is treating serious and persistent mental illness is not lucrative. In fact it is a financial sink if you choose a rehabilitative model, and even an asylum model, which is generally more cost efficient (but can be done with some dignity) is still quite expensive.
The fucked up part is that prisons are quite expensive too but less so and as a result are quite lucrative to their owners. They also are culturally built into this sense of redemptive justice, as if punishment of the offender actually does something to bring peace to the offended besides deluding them that the chaotic and violent world won’t wrong them again because one unjust act has been forcibly atoned without creating any sense of remorse before returning the person back to society (just exposing them to one of the most traumatizing and violent environments for years or decades with no support, what could go wrong?).
So we ignore mountains of evidence that rehabilitation oriented programming is overall more successful because it’s not perfect, someone will still get murdered and assaulted! And they won’t get horribly punished! And we stick with our terrible system that objectively results in much more people getting murdered and assaulted
It appears there are replies to this thread that call into question many of the things stated
it reeks of punditry - surface level knowledge and worst case scenarios presented with lots of confidence. fwiw the persons quoted qualifications have absolutely nothing to do with law. They are a “blockchain” and data science person who also does venture capital and angel investing, aka a classic “I don’t know when to stay in my fucking lane and think that because I made a shitload of money I must be a genius at everything ever” type