http://pjmedia.com/blog/fixing-our-mental-health-system/?print=1
The recent tragedy in Newtown has finally woken Americans up to the pitiful state of our mental health system. We have had many dozens of these tragedies over the last three decades, and certainly, the pattern has been clear since at least 2000: people with recognized serious mental-illness problems are about half of these mass murderers [1], and it seems likely that much of the rest had unrecognized or perhaps merely undocumented problems. (What sane person murders a bunch of complete strangers, then commits suicide?)
I have been banging the drum on this for several years, and each time, someone asks, “How are you going to pay for all this?” Mental hospitals are expensive to build, especially because so many states have either closed or demolished their state institutions. Once built, operating costs are substantial. In an era when many state governments are already in financial trouble, where is the money coming from to create a safer and more humane society?
We are already spending the money; we just aren’t spending it very efficiently, because we are spending it on cleanup. Drawing chalk marks around bodies, having medical examiners do autopsies, assigning extra police to schools across the country after each disaster — these aren’t free.
Many of these mass murderers do not commit suicide, and trying them is expensive. The public defender costs alone for capital murder trials [2] in Clark County, Nevada, for 2009-2011 were $229,800; for non-capital murder cases, $60,100. It seems quite believable that including prosecution costs, time spent operating the courts and investigating the crime, and the inevitable appeals a non-capital murder trial can easily cost the government $500,000, especially because mentally ill defendants are almost always indigent, and thus receive public defenders. I almost forgot: because these are mentally ill murderers, the costs of experts to evaluate the defendant’s mental competency for trial almost certainly drives these costs up even higher.