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Perhaps it is the plight of the mentally ill who best illustrate this pincer movement. By the end of the1990s, both Democratic and Republican dismantling of social services and the rise of the carceral state effected a major shift in how the U.S. cares for the mentally ill. Consider the words of Tom Dart, the Sheriff responsible for supervising Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the country, housing 10-12,000 prisoners, a population larger than many Illinois town populations. “Cook County Jail has become the state of Illinois’ largest “mental health hospital,” reports Dart. One third of the jail’s confines suffer from serious mental illness, and the facility is not equipped, he emphasizes, to be such a hospital.
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