Ever since the advent of Thorazine and the like, with the slow demise of the state hospital system, prisons have become repositories of disruptive, impoverished, mentally ill men. Psychotic, aggressive men who just a few years ago would have lived out their days muttering quietly to themselves or raising havoc on the back wards of state hospitals now make the rounds of prisons, shelters, and a dwindling assortment of available public psychiatric institutions.
