Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The author of that statement was Richard Kellogg, Director of the Mental Health Division of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

No specific data was presented to prove such a broad, sweeping charge against all of the mental hospitals in the U.S.A.  

The first thing any beginning high school or college student should learn is never to make such overall indictments minus research data to prove your point beyond a reasonable doubt.  We need not look back any further than 1963 to find out why the majority of U.S. mental hospitals vanished.

President Kennedy in 1963 signed the so-called Community Mental Health Centers Act.  It was intended to provide prevention and treatment of the mentally ill, outside of mental hospitals for all, based on financial situations.  

Richard Kellogg, in this article on de-institutionalizing mental patients, puts it this unique way:

"But when patients were de-institutionalized no one envisioned such a subset of patients with this degree of violence."

When Shannon Harps, a Sierra Club worker who lived in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle, was murdered by a released mental patient wielding a butcher knife outside the apartment house where she resided New Year's Eve 2007, a judge had earlier provided a dangerous individual with freedom.  The resulting vicious murder stunned and angered Seattle's fearful city dwellers.  The judge's name was not mentioned:

"My wife and I live just across the street from where this happened!" a stunned resident exclaimed as his wife stood next to him and he pointed to the small apartment building across the street where the deceased lived, and in front of which the murder occurred.  "This could just as easily have happened to me or my wife!"

James Williams, who had an incredible background of mental illness, should have been locked up for good years earlier.  He has now been charged with the stabbing death of the young woman.

Who is responsible for allowing Williams to chase around, free to kill innocent victims?

Of course, nobody wants to be held accountable for this heinous and unnecessary murder.   Having had so much violence involving mental patients committing crimes of every description, those in charge of controlling the mentally ill when crimes occur, have become experts at shifting any responsibility to protect their jobs and incomes.  

James Williams himself was a clever, mentally character, and always swift to shift the blame for his dark deeds.  When he appeared in King County Superior Court recently, charged with stabbing the young Seattle woman to death, he asked to speak in his own defense.  

When this request was allowed, Williams passionately rambled on, explaining why he had shot a stranger at a bus stop back in 1995 on Seattle's mean streets.

"I didn't even ask to be born," Williams flatly told the judge.

The period when Williams was born 48 years ago was when the experiment to free the mentally ill from U.S. insane asylums took place.  James Williams' stabbing death of Shannon Harps brings into sharp focus the total failure and disaster wrought upon innocent victims when the mentally ill are no longer confined.

There is no excuse on behalf of those responsible for keeping this dangerous killer where he belonged - in a mental hospital - not on Seattle's streets, free to roam and kill at random.

How did this happen?

Williams was arrested in 1995 for shooting a stranger at a bus stop in downtown Seattle.  A police report read in bold face print:

"Do not release!!!  Suspect shot a stranger with a large caliber pistol.  The suspect is a danger to all citizens!"

This police report was tragically ignored by prosecutors who were sadly not named in the Post-Intelligencer March 26 report of how Williams was set free:

"Despite his record, prosecutors determined Williams' prior offenses in other states didn't qualify him to be prosecuted under the state's three strikes criteria that would have put him in prison for life.  Instead Williams got 11 years for the shooting."

Did this prosecutor's decision lead to the death of Shannon Harps on New Year's Eve 2007?  That is the question authorities must answer!

There were 565,000 mental hospital beds in the 1970's.  It is down now to about one-tenth of that, and some argue that is far below what is needed desperately now.  In Carol Smith's Post-Intelligencer article on William she reveals the cost of operating mental hospitals:

"State hospitals are expensive to run.  Filling a bed in a state's psychiatric hospital costs $145,000 to $190,000 a year.  It costs only $9,000 a year to provide housing and mental health for a mentally ill patient after release from prison."

But even this cost in the current program in Washington State for the mentally ill is lacking around $400,000, which has been the amount of budget overspending on the mentally ill.

Carol Smith reveals how Williams' mind works.  He has served time in prison for writing bad checks and thought his grandmother was trying to kill him with the TV remote control.   He claimed the medicine he was prescribed to take to keep his minder under some measure of control was destroying his brain, so naturally he wasn't taking it much of the time.

But Williams did take a knife with him, and claimed he slept with a loaded gun, explaining to a counselor in 1990, "If people mess with me I will get pleasure in killing them."

Apparently Williams obtained a measure of pleasure shooting at one of his victims at that Seattle bus stop in 1995, but he apparently achieved his ultimate pleasure stabbing Shannon Harps, commanding her to die as she shrieked in the throes of death.

We were all safer with the mentally ill locked up where they couldn't kill people at random in America's now mean streets, that's for sure!