Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy shared his thoughts on why America is struggling to tamp down on violent crime during a segment on Monday’s episode of “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
Host Jesse Watters argued that many of the ills our society is reckoning with stem from our shut down of insane asylums. He asked Ramaswamy if he would bring back mental health institutions if he were elected president. (RELATED: Democratic Mayors Reverse Course On Psychiatric Treatments For Homeless)
“I think this is a clear path to fighting the violent crime wave across this country, Jesse. I’ve said it at the debates. I’m the only candidate in either party talking about it, because it’s a taboo subject. But we have to talk about the hard truth. Violent crime has risen over precisely the period that we have shuttered these psychiatric institutions. And you know what? The number one psychiatric institution today is? Jail, it’s prison, and they don’t do a very good job,” Ramaswamy said.
He said that we are now seeing calls to remove criminals from prison in the name of criminal justice reforms. Those who entered jail with mental health issues leave jail “in a worse psychiatric condition,” Ramaswamy argued.
Ramaswamy stated that there were “limited cases of abuse” in psychiatric wards in the past, which has made the topic of institutionalization “taboo.” He argued that we can learn from these past mistakes and take new approaches to make mental health asylums better. He also said that large pharmaceutical companies “benefitted” from the closure of asylums through their creation of “anti-psychotics and other forms of antidepressants.”
Violent crime has spiked in numerous blue cities which have elected progressive prosecutors. Ramaswamy has argued before that mental health institutions need to make a major return in order to tackle the nation’s mental health crisis.