Though the experience of being 5150’d is not the same as being arrested (“You are not under criminal arrest”), there are inevitable parallels between involuntary hospitalization and incarceration. In both circumstances, a confined person’s ability to control their life and their body is dramatically reduced; they are at the mercy of those in control; they must behave in prescribed ways to acquire privileges and eventually, perhaps, to be released. And then there is the wide swath of people for whom mental illness and imprisonment overlap: according to the Department of Justice, “nearly 1.3
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