On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line,” co-host Dagen McDowell and Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) discussed the recent fatal stabbing on a train in Charlotte and said that the number of psychiatric hospital beds has to be increased, which will require spending the money to do so.
McDowell asked, “I can tell you that the number of state psychiatric hospital beds is at a record low. There are only — they’re under 37,000, and more than half of them in this country are taken up by people who are in those beds because of criminal offenses. When is anybody in this country, in power, in an elected job, going to fund psychiatric hospitals to lock up these potential murderers?”
Fine responded that Florida doesn’t have those problems.
McDowell countered that there are dangerous mentally ill people in Florida. Fine responded that Florida has a Baker Act that is better than the laws in other places and said that “we need to have more institutions.” And when it comes to the problem of evil, “We can arrest our way out of it. We can institutionalize our way out of it. And we have to be willing to do that.”
McDowell then stated, “With respect, you can’t institutionalize the dangerously mentally ill if there’s nowhere to put them.” Fine responded, “Well, you have to spend money, I agree.”
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