Mental Illness And Crime: What The Legacy Of Dorothea Dix Hath Wrought - it's often the case in mainstream media that someone will write about something and a whole bunch of people will follow suit. So it was noted that there are a lot more mentally ill people in prisons than in mental hospitals and progressives went on and made that out to be a failure of stingy Republicans - except mental hospitals were shut down by progressive social activists, not right-wing people who just want to put people in jail.

Dorothea Dix first noted that mentally ill people should not be in jail, but now she is blamed for institutionalizing mental illness. Yet the people who experimented on the mentally ill were psychologists hired by governments so it seems strange to see calls for government to fund more mental hospitals today.