Editorial: Psychiatric patients need hospital beds, not jail cells
Los Angeles County leaders often call their jail system the nation's largest mental hospital, and to our great collective shame, they are correct. The jails are where we dump thousands of people who really ought to be in psychiatric hospitals, community-based rehabilitation programs or supportive housing. Those facilities were supposed to be built decades ago to replace state mental institutions, which too often served as abusive warehouses for society's sick and unwanted. The state institutions
