of reduced public mental health budgets were thrown on to the streets if they did not have the means to live indoors and to obtain some form of care and protection.
Finally, the legal environment regarding the treatment of the mentally disabled changed. Liberal intellectuals such as Perlin (1997 January) argued that society has an unfulfilled obligation to ensure that the elderly, homeless and/or mentally ill were treated better. He said "we can judge the state of a civilization by the way it treats those without a home" (p. 65). A series of Supreme Court and lower court federal and state courts took up the cause of the mentally disabled and examined the constitutionality of various state involuntary commitment statutes. One, O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975), involved a Florida prison inmate who has been institutionalized for 15 years even though he had not been found to be dangerous. The Court found that the prisoner's due process rights under the 5th and 14th amendments to the Constitution had been violated. J
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