>>514803267
The book and movie 'One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' convinced the public that asylums were bad. There were also tons of court cases that found that asylums actually were bad. The cost to make them compliant with court orders was astronomical for the time.
When Reagan became president, the Democrats were yelling and screaming that asylums should be shutdown because they were inhumane. Reagan saw the cost for running them, both at the federal level and through grants to the states, and went along with the program outlined by the Democrats where most people in asylums would be put into community programs run by local governments.
What sounded like a good idea in theory became a huge failure in practice, as many of those who had been institutionalized refused to cooperate in the community programs. They'd stop taking their prescription meds and go find illegal drugs to self medicate instead. The community programs would lose track of them. Then some communities realized they could simply push the problem off to other communities. It started to become the standard for cities to dump their crazies on each other in an never ending flow of crazies in each city's downtown.
Now there are crazies everywhere and it's considered a terrible human rights violation to reel in their behavior. Their existence in public gives over to all manner of antisocial behavior and normalizes it.