Summary of Remarks
Stephen Metraux, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Health Policy
"Mental Health and Community Reentry from Prison"
September 27, 2006

Many individuals reside within a myriad of institutions over the course of their lives, including mental health wards, jails, homeless shelters, colleges, monasteries, and military bases. While these facilities serve different functions all who reside within their walls are housed as numbers, and the human perspective is forgone for mass storage of individuals. Whether residing in an institution on a voluntary or an involuntary basis, all individuals are parts of a collective environment designed to deliver a specific service.

A pattern of institutionalized residents is to go from one kind of institution to another for a range of reasons all the while being housed at society’s expense. After leaving these institutions, a state of homelessness is often the result. This is a recurring historical theme. For example, during the Depression of the 1930s, an indigent population was housed in various temporary institutions until more suitable accommodations could be found. These individuals often ended up in various different facilities for many years recycling through a crowed system.

As individuals move through different institutions, monetary realities are ever looming. Who pays to house these individuals? Services are rendered at staggering costs spanning many agencies and facilities when in most cases the end result for the recipients of these services is homelessness. Records show these individuals spend just as much, if not more, time being transient than temporarily housed. The “institutional circuit” becomes their home for many years.

Tools and processes to track these individuals, marking how they became involved in the system and tracking their movement through it may be the key to understanding the institutional circuit and attempting to curtail it. The reality of the “institutionalized individual” affects not only the individuals involved but also those charged with their care, as well as the taxpayers footing the bill for the stay. Today’s societal structure does little to curtail this phenomenon. Rather, apathy and hopelessness is the more common attitude.