Activists participate in a rally to call for peer-led, non-police response to mental health crisis calls, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) Earlier this month, a man stabbed five people at Penn Station in Manhattan, in what witnesses described as a random attack.
Last month, a 21-year-old man opened fire outside of the White House.
Two months before that, three people were randomly slashed at Manhattan’s Grand Central Station.
Last year, a man stabbed 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina.
All of these situations all had one thing in common: someone with a criminal history and a mental illness. These attacks, occurring in shared public spaces, drive fear and uncertainty about public safety solutions. The outrage is understandable. But the knee-jerk questions — “Why were they let out?” “Why weren’t they locked up?” — are wrong. If you want change, you should be asking: “Why didn’t they get help?”
The pattern is consistent. A person with documented mental illness and a long history of criminal justice system involvement commits a violent act in public. The criminal record becomes the focal point. The untreated mental health crisis — the thing that preceded every arrest, every release, every tragedy — gets a paragraph at most, dismissed as an excuse rather than the underlying cause. Why are we focused on a feel-good band-aid approach that is ineffective, instead of an actual preventive solution? These questions have driven American criminal justice policy for decades and the answer has almost always been the same: punish more. Evidence consistently shows that punitive, carceral responses are ineffective and cost the nation about $445 billion annually. Yet the federal government is not only reverting to failed strategies like increasing law enforcement presence in schools — which has already proven to be ineffective at preventing violence — and instead feeds the school-to-prison pipeline and makes students feel less safe. It is also actively cutting scientific research that tells us what actually works.
Deinstitutionalization policies shuttered psychiatric facilities in the 1970s and 1980s without replacing them with an accessible, affordable mental health infrastructure. Instead, we built more jails. The criminalization of mental illness is now what happens when someone in crisis calls 911, and law enforcement shows up instead of a trained clinician.
Nearly 15 million Americans suffer from severe mental illness, yet psychiatric bed availability in some states falls to just 5 per 100,000 people, far below the estimated 50 needed. By 2010, an estimated 378,000 incarcerated people had severe mental illness, making U.S. prisons and jails de facto psychiatric facilities.
COVID deepened the crisis. Job loss, housing instability and isolation drove a surge in mental illness at precisely the moment treatment systems were already overwhelmed. The same people ended up cycling through emergency rooms, courtrooms and prisons and jails — each stop more destabilizing than the last.
Incarceration does not treat mental illness. Over 95 percent of incarcerated people are eventually released — often more symptomatic, more isolated and with fewer community connections than when they went in. Longer sentences do not improve safety because locking people up does nothing about the conditions that produce crime. The policy that actually creates safety ensures someone in a psychiatric crisis has somewhere to go long before they’re standing on a platform with a knife.
This is not an argument against public safety. It advocates for a better, evidence-based way to do it. Riders on the subway deserve to feel safe. Community members deserve to live free of fear.
That means research-driven, evidence-based community reinvestment. It means community mental health clinics with accessible, affordable care. It means mobile crisis response teams that reach people before they escalate. It also means stable housing, because recovery from mental illness is not possible without a place to live, and continuity of care that breaks the revolving door between hospital, street and jail.
These are not soft-on-crime strategies. They address the root contributors of crime and violence that impact long-term safety. The public deserves policy responses grounded in evidence, not ones shaped by political agendas and media-driven fear.
The evidence is there. The political will is not. It is time to ask the harder question before we have the same conversation after the next attack.
Cassandra Ramdath is a faculty research scholar at Yale Law School and research director at the affiliated Justice Collaboratory.
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