Dysfunctional social control of mental illness: a commentary on Yoon.

摘要

Historically, psychiatric hospitals have functioned as a source of control of persons who are unable to care for themselves and whose behavior may be threatening to the social order (Grob, 1994; Horwitz, 1982). Cross-system relationships between the mental health and criminal justice system have been studied under various time periods and at both the individual and macro levels. One of the earliest studies, by Penrose (1939) showed that, across European countries, there was an inverse relationship between the number of inhabitants of mental institutions and the number of prisoners. The study of cross-system effects in the U.S. in recent decades has been influenced by deinstitutionalization, the rise of homelessness, and the increase in the proportion of persons with mental illness in jails and prisons. As Yoon points out in "Effect of increased private share of inpatient psychiatric resources on jail population growth: Evidence from the United States" (2011) in this issue of Social Science & Medicine, cross-system relationships can be understood through social threat theory, which asserts that institutions of social control expand in response to increases in the perceived size of groups that have the potential to create disruption in the political and economic system (Liska, 1992). Moreover, it is hypothesized that the capacities of institutions of social control covary with each other (Liska, Markowitz, Bridges-Whaley, & Bellair, 1999; Marko-witz, 2006). Studies in this area have generally focused on aggregated units of each institution (e.g., total beds, total number of inmates).