NY Ends Lockup of Mentally Ill
New York is abandoning its longtime practice of putting the mentally ill in lockups
"Officials at state psychiatric hospitals in New York ordered social workers this week to stop sending discharged patients to locked units in private nursing homes. The move ends a six-year-old practice that was supposed to help scale back the state's costly psychiatric system but has raised civil rights concerns."
Don't credit Governor Pataki though. He has been unresponsive. The change comes about as a result of the Department of Justice, which began a review of the lockup facilities on October 6, after reading a report in the New York Times. The goal of the review was to "determine whether conditions violate federal laws that protect the rights of people who are institutionalized or have disabilities."
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