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The Casualties of “Deinstitutionalization”

City Journal
March 9, 2026
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In City Journal, Christina Buttons describes the wreckage caused by the precipitous decline in residential treatment beds for mentally ill teens. Where do they end up? Increasingly, in “juvenile detention”, i.e., jail. Buttons’ detailed report offers a cautionary tale for Canada, where provinces are also grappling over whether to force the mentally ill and/or drug-addicted to undergo treatment (as Alberta is now doing) or simply leave them to suffer (and often endanger others) on the street.

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Institutional Betrayal

Writing in City Journal, Ilya Shapiro considers Canada’s expanding habit of cancelling anyone with unpopular opinions in his review of Collin May’s new book From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture: Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation. Shapiro notes the book carries “unusual immediacy” since May knows of what he writes, having lost his position as chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission due to politically motivated complaints about a C2C Journal essay he wrote 13 years earlier. For more on May’s journey, see this C2C article.

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Judging by the number of high-profile Indian-born global tech leaders, one might assume India’s education system is second to none. But as Lipton Matthews reveals in American Greatness, the results are hardly comprehensive. Nearly three out of four rural school children are unable to do even simple math. “The Indian professionals who rise to the top of Google or Microsoft are not a representative sample…they are survivors of an unusually harsh selection process,” Matthews observes. For more on India’s rise to greatness, see this C2C article.

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