You don't remember when they started releasing people from the institutions? It has been some years now. You find them sleeping in cardboard boxes all over the place and living in homeless camps. Tax payers are paying for them because they qualify for SSI. Prisons are full of people suffering from mental illness. Its just a shame for the victims that these people had not been put in an institution prior to them committing horrible crimes. Just an opinion.
I understand and do know about all of that, my father was a prison psychiatrist for over 40 years and we have discussed this very issue in fact.
The problem is, the ones who belong in institutions because they cannot function and take care of themselves outside are not the ones committing these crimes, the ones committing the crimes are usually pretty high functioning individuals much like Mr. Holmes, who was, according to reports, college educated and working towards a doctorate degree in neuroscience, no small matter that. It is people like him who can be dangerous as they are not easy to recognize or diagnose let alone incarcerate and institutionalize.
I also remember how these people in those institutions were treated back then before they were released and how the abuse they suffered at the hands of those charged with caring for them, led to their release to begin with and further the closure of most of those institutions in the end.
Since a person like Mr. Holmes seems capable of caring for himself, for the most part, in the outside world, it is not a simple legal matter to just grab him and lock him up in an institution, nor do I think, is it fair to him, as he has just as much a right to freedom and liberty as the rest of us (before he committed this crime at least). A simple doctors visit, to a doctor who isnt overworked and underpaid, probably could have fixed his problems with the right medication, education and supervision.
I for one do not want to revisit the days where the mentally ill were raped, experimented on, chained up and locked away from their loved ones all because we as a society lack the creativity and imagination that is required for us to discover a better way to handle the problem.