In 1880 – after Dorothea Dix’s successful crusade for state psychiatric hospitals – less than 1% of the inmates incarcerated in American jails and prisons suffered from a mental illness. Applied to the current population behind bars, that rate would translate to 23,538 mentally ill prisoners.

Today, the prevalence of mental illness in correctional facilities is conservatively estimated at between 7% and 16%. Applied to the 2,353,855 inmates the Department of Justice reports were housed in jails and prisons in 2010, this translates into 164,770 to 376,617 prisoners with mental illness. That’s enough people to populate Fort Lauderdale on the low side or Minneapolis on the high side.

Most people with mental illness are behind bars because of acts they wouldn’t have committed if they had received effective treatment – and incarceration isn’t the only consequence of non-treatment they and their communities experience.

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