Sick Transit

Just got back from dinner at Eva Restaurant; Meia had asparagus bisque and mussels, and I had a flan made with Cabrales cheese, and loin of rabbit. For any Seattleites reading, I highly recommend this place. Zagat rates it a 25 on food (equal to Wild Ginger or Chez Shea), and deservedly so; but the prices are those of a neighborhood restaurant ($15 entrees, $5 starters). If the same place were downtown instead of in Greenlake, the tab would be twice as much. Highly recommended. (And try the Malbec.)

Bernard Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, has a fascinating series of guest blog posts at Volokh about the relationship between institutionalization in mental hospitals and imprisonment.

A shorter version of his argument is in this op-ed, but the real key is this graph (click for a larger view):

The cumulative rate of institutionalization (mental and penal) dropped precipitiously with the trend of deinstitutionalization in the late 60’s and early 70’s, but starting in the 80’s imprisonment gradually picked up the slack to raise total institutionalization almost (but not entirely) back to the the levels of the first half of the century.

Harcourt notes that while the US’ rate of total institutionalization is still more than double the EU’s, the difference is not nearly as great as between our rates of imprisonment. He also finds that institutionalization is inversely correlated with homicide, and is a better predictor of homicide rates than imprisonment alone.

Harcourt admits that the public policy conclusions of his research are unclear. But a minimum, the graph above should make it impossible to ignore the role of mental illness–and varying definitions of deviance–in our nation’s rising imprisonment rates.