Relaxin’ at Camarillo
Posted: November 15, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
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“Relaxin’ at Camarillo” is a composition by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. It is inspired by his six-month stay in Camarillo State Hospital in Ventura County, California, after serving a prison term for arson and resisting arrest. The tune is a blues in C major and has become a jazz standard.
The heroin in Los Angeles was not of the quality or ample supply Charlie Parker needed, he turned to alcohol and things got bad. This was the incident that sent Charlie Parker into the system:
That according to Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix. (No mention of the arson, interesting. Other sources say Parker lit his hotel sheets on fire.) On the website Saving Charlie Parker I find this photo of the Civic Hotel:
It was in Bronzeville, now Little Tokyo.
Reading about Kansas City lead me to Charlie Parker and, inadvertently, back to my own backyard, and to the history of mental health treatment in California and the nation.
From the Wiki page for Camarillo State Hospital:
The end of the institution came due to economic challenges and a changing outlook on mental health treatment. In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bi-partisan Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which greatly affected state hospital populations, forcing many to close immediately.
Another contributing factor was in 1996, when Governor Pete Wilson empowered a special task force to research reasons for and against the closure of the Camarillo State Hospital and Developmental Center.[2] The task force cited that the facility, which housed as many as 7,266 patients in 1954, had only 871 clients in 1996. The hospitals per capita costs had risen to nearly $114,000, second highest in the state mental health system. These factors prompted the initial closing of one-quarter of the facility’s 64 units and later, on June 30, 1996, the hospital officially and permanently closed.
The intentions and consequences of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act seem quite complicated. Genuine concern for the well-being of the mentally disturbed may have led to policies that in the end left more people uncared for.
Reporter Dan Morain, writing at the Center for Health Journalism:
As a Capitol reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later a columnist and editorial writer for the Sacramento Bee, I covered some of those legislative battles. But I did not know fundamental details about the law — how the final bill was gutted and amended on the final day of the legislative session in 1967, and how it was a compromise that guaranteed that Reagan’s administration and local governments would have no legal or financial obligation to provide care for people once housed in state hospitals, or those who in an earlier day would have been in asylums.
Internal Reagan administration documents show that soon after the law took effect, the number of prison inmates with psychiatric issues increased, and private nursing homes began caring for larger numbers of people with severe mental illness.
In the years after its passage, Lanterman and his coauthors, Democratic Sens. Nicholas Petris of Oakland and Alan Short of Stockton, became alarmed at increasing numbers of homeless people struggling with mental illness — an issue that has become a dominant issue in California politics today.
Bold mine. Sometimes you hear cocktail party history that “Reagan closed all the asylums” but the truth as usual seems more complex. What about the Community Mental Health Act of 1963? or the history of Thorazine? This seems like it’s just a messy, messy problem. There’s a history of the feds and the states sending it down to “the community” without any funding, or with funding that later gets taken away, and the community doesn’t handle it.
This feels like a good summary.
JFK signing the CMHA:
An outcome where the patient, instead of facing criminal charges, is taken to a state hospital with beautiful Mission style architecture, heals for six months, comes out happy, and continues a productive artistic career, is that not optimal? Is it possible our reforms, even if well intentioned, were misguided? Every day I walk past an averages of two distressed/ disturbed individuals on our streets. Could we be relaxing them at Camarillo?
Then again Charlie Parker died at 34, not in great shape, so… maybe these are just tough challenges.
Helytimes 