"John Hinckley shot President Reagan because he knew, not thought, knew that was the best way to get a date with Jodie Foster," Jaffe tells me in my latest internet video collaboration with City Journal.
"We decided we would largely replace that system with mental health care in the community," says Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Community treatment made sense. Care would be easier and cheaper in the patients' own neighborhoods. Patients would be closer to their families, who could visit.
But community treatment never really happened. Politicians didn't fund it. Neighborhood mental health facilities were not popular with their constituents.
Many mentally ill people now end up in prison. "Prison is no place for somebody with schizophrenia," says Eide. "However, that's where they're going to remain.
Today, more seriously mentally ill people are locked up in Los Angeles County Jail, Cook County Jail and New York's Rikers Island jail than in any mental hospital.
America has some high-quality mental hospitals, but they don't have enough money to give the extended treatment that most seriously ill people need.
Unfortunately, most of those initiatives address people who are not very sick. "They wrap anything that makes you sad — bad grades, poverty, coming from a single-parent household — in a mental health narrative," says Jaffe.
So most funds don't go to helping the people diving into dumpsters or to protecting us from threatening people on the street.
Why then do authorities focus on comparatively minor problems? "They don't cost as much to help! Serving the seriously mentally ill is a really difficult task," he adds.
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I googled "when did deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill begin"; here is one which compliments, somewhat, the above article.
Where they eventually join the Democrat party.