> Note how in Scott's argument it's taken for granted that the US can't possibly build such facilities to hold and help "tens of thousands of people", but not acknowleding how US prisons hold an order of magnitude more people - 1,230,100 people as of 2022, per Bureau of Justice Statistics.

And a nontrivial number of those people are there as a result (to some degree or another) of their mental illness. We're already paying the cost, we're just doing it in a particularly ineffective, inefficient, and cruel way.