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My colleague Tim Arango has this dispatch from Los Angeles County, at the heart of debates about the roles of jails as mental health facilities:

The men’s jail in downtown Los Angeles is often referred to as America’s largest mental health institution, a dystopian, run-down facility where mentally ill inmates are often chained to the furniture.

Ill-equipped to handle the swelling ranks of the mentally ill, the jail has fed into another of the city’s intractable social problems: homelessness, with a revolving door between the jail and nearby Skid Row.

City leaders for years have known it was a problem, but have never agreed on a solution.

That long fight over the future of incarceration in Los Angeles reached a crucial point this week. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles board of supervisors voted to cancel a nearly $2 billion contract for a new facility it had described as a mental health treatment facility and approved in February, in the face of opposition from activists who said the building was just a new jail in disguise.