I think it may not be quite so two dimensional though, given that "mental hospital" is all but euphemistic for what those old asylums were like compared with modern psychiatric wards.

Actually addressing care is a lot more expensive than just locking people away.

That said, shifting from asylums for all to care for a select few while the rest are thrown into prisons with hardened criminals and patting ourselves on the back for the progress of the hospitals is hardly justified, even if it does make for good political soundbites and a facade of progress.

There's also the matter of these populations not necessarily being the same populations. Many who'd have been in asylums in the past now live their lives in a drugged up pharmaceutical haze, while meanwhile, other antecedents for criminal activity have stepped up thanks to, among other things, the debasement of currency lowering living standards and creating an impetus to find less legal ways to keep one's head and family above water. The same debasement that may well have funded the psychiatric research in the first place that led to drugs that allowed the asylums to be emptied.