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Commentary By Stephen Eide

Supervision of the Mentally Ill Can Reduce Violence and Create Safer Communities

Public Safety Policing, Crime Control

To improve public safety, governments across the nation need to provide more supervision for mentally ill people. That can happen either in a hospital or community-based setting, and under involuntary or voluntary conditions.

Supervision is a necessary condition of effective treatment. Somewhere around 40%-50% of seriously mentally ill individuals receive no treatment for their condition. As a result, they are often involved in subway pushings and other random assaults on strangers, and comprise 15%-20% of the incarcerated population, despite comprising only around 5% of the adult population

Continue reading the entire piece here at Policing Insight

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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in Policing Insight