While I get what Chandra Bozelko is saying in her recent Hartford Courant editorial, it seems to me that her comments serve to advance the prison-industrial complex.
Ms. Bozelko says, quite rightly, that Adam Lanza would not have benefited from being institutionalized or forced into psychiatric care. Most psychiatric hospitalization today is, as she points out, simply warehousing. If Lanza had been diagnosed autistic, he would probably have been subjected to Applied Behavior Analysis, a behavior modification protocol using rewards and aversives to teach autistics to mimic "normal" behavior.
My disagreement with Ms. Bozelko comes with her seeming endorsement of prison as a better place for the mentally ill because they are made to work. She overlooks the fact that many mentally ill people go through phases of extreme feelings of terror and exhaustion. These indescribable feelings can overcome a person for many reasons. At such times they are incapable of working, and may become completely withdrawn. A prison environment would amplify these feelings beyond measure. The old Kirkbride institutions had a lot of different industries for patients to engage in useful work, but I'm sure that they were not forced to work when they were in this state of mind. Many times, someone suffering that level of fear actually benefits from some type of responsibly administered pressure therapy, cf. Temple Grandin's "hug box".
Ms. Bozelko is aware that prison work requirements are criticized as amounting to slavery, but she apparently feels some of that criticism is unwarranted because work fosters in inmates a sense of responsibility, a feeling that they are valued. Well, slavery was also said to be beneficial for giving African Americans a sense of purpose and value. People are apt to come away from Ms. Bozelko's article believing that she is in favor of warehousing psychiatric patients in prisons and expanding the prison-industrial complex. I'm sure that is not what she meant to suggest.