[1] For instance, when the residential mental hospitals in the United States were closed as the result of a political policy change, the prison population increased by an equivalent number.
He argued that by increasing the number of mental institution beds, a society could reduce serious crimes and imprisonment rates.
[4] The downsizing of the large psychiatric hospitals in the US and the UK started in the mid-1950s then occurred in most Western European countries during the 1970s.
[5] Deinstitutionalisation, the contraction of traditional institutional settings and especially a decline in the number of beds, is a process that takes several decades.
[5] It has been conjectured that patients, who lost their homes during the deinstitutionalisation from the large hospitals failed to make the change to independent community living, and self-transinstitutionalised into the criminal custodial system.