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“Treatment” in such facilities is typically done against a backdrop of despair and hopelessness. The bitter truth is, these maladies are viewed by many in the mental health profession as incurable, life-long conditions, and the only viable treatment is chemical lobotomy via Psychotropics. So they get them in during a psychotic break, mainly to get them on meds that make them totally miserable, but hopefully less violent. Once they are released, they decide not to be miserable and stop the meds. I get that. Who in their right mind would stay on a regimen that results in involuntary tongue twitching ... for life. It’s a horror show. So the cycle continues.

And permanently locking “them” up en masse is not so easy a solution either, because first you have to figure out who “they” are. Not everyone who “hears voices” or is otherwise psychotic is dangerous to others in the sense of directed aggression. Most that I have dealt with are simply out of touch with reality, but in a very passive way. They do need help, but often their condition can be improved more by living among normal people than by incarceration and isolation.

So who gets to determine who is “dangerous” and who is not? A “dangerous to self or others” classification is so broad I can envision a soviet style approach to tea party members as “dangerously psychotic.” You can already see that language being used in the struggle to overcome Obamacare.

So that easy sounding “lock em up” solution has its own pitfalls. A better long term solution, IMHO, is 1) to start backing off knee-jerk psychotropic treatments. Many nasty psychoses can be treated more effectively by methods that approach the patient as a responsible moral agent, not simply a miswired brain that must be shut down to be “saved.” It is even possible that prolonged use of psychotropics does lasting damage that makes the disease hang on much longer than it would have otherwise.

And 2) the legal grounds for compulsory treatment must be carefully reviewed and revised to define “dangerousness” in terms of demonstrated capacity for directed aggression. The shooters have all been highly functional persons, able to stage fairly well thought out attacks. These individuals are far more dangerous than the “violent” individual whose acts are things like shoving a case worker etc. It would be easy to dump them all in the same bin and call the problem solved. But it would be wrong.

And finally 3) we cannot abandon our long history of holding people criminally accountable only AFTER they have committed a criminal act. Our entire system of individual rights would collapse if we ever give the government permission to lock us up if they think we might be “dangerous” at some point in the future. Under the wrong regime, it would be trivial to get a psychiatric evaluation of “dangerousness” on anyone out of favor with the regime.

So, as hard as it is, we need to stick to the longstanding pattern of criminal punishment only for actual criminal acts. Mentally ill people are still humans made in God’s image, just like us, and still have rights, including the right to live free, to the extent possible for each individual. The law needs to sustain those rights by getting to a more exact and narrow definition of “dangerousness,” one that will give us early warning on those who present an imminent threat to innocent people, while not trampling on the right to live free.