In the early 1800's, Americans opened hospitals to care for people with mental illness, removing patients from their communities for treatment into often-overcrowded hospital wards. Indiana's first mental hospital, Central State, opened in 1848. This facility's 1994 closure was part of a nationwide process called the deinstitutionalization that began in the 1960's. Policymakers, politicians, and phsychiatrists worled intensively to create community-based mental health care. However in Indiana, like most of the country, these facilities were inadequate to the need. Today, encounters between people with mental illness and law enforcement result in more people with mental illness recieving care in correctional facilities than in state hospitals. The stress and isolation of incarceration often causes people's mental health to deteriorate. Policies including mental health counts, which Indianapolis advocates pioneered, divert people with mental illness from correctional facilities. Improving conditions in prisons and jails and providing treatment upon release could break the cycle.