Oregon State Hospital has backlog of guilty except for insanity patients deemed ready for discharge

It didn’t used to be that way. For years, the Oregon State Hospital (above) primarily housed people with chronic mental illness, some of whom stayed there for years. That began to change as the state shifted away from long-term institutionalization. In the 1970s, the Oregon Legislature passed laws to send people charged with crimes to the state hospital — both those who were deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and those found guilty except for insanity.