Patients were treated poorly, languished for years and died mysteriously at South Florida State Psychiatric Hospital, in the view of mental health care advocates. The state-owned hospital was so rife with problems, it was threatened with closure when the state legislature voted in 1997 to contract out its operation to a private company that hopes to operate it at a profit.

• Experts say the 350-bed hospital is the first state mental hospital in the United States to be turned over completely to a private company.

• The winning bidder for the contract was Atlantic Shores Healthcare, a subsidiary of Wackenhut Corrections Corporation -- one of the companies that started the boom in private-enterprise prisons a decade ago.

• Local advocates for the mentally ill say conditions have improved -- for example, patients are now put into treatment programs intended to get them out -- and in 1999 the hospital received accreditation from the Joint Comission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

• Wackenhut is paid $32 million a year to operate the hospital, and has cut costs to turn a profit -- including reducing full-time staff positions from 720 to 500 since November 1998, with plans to cut 80 more jobs to pay for a new building.

Nationwide, the number of institutionalized mental patients has dropped sharply, from about 560,000 in 1955 to 59,000 in 1996. At South Florida State, the vast majority of patients are involuntarily committed by judges as a danger to themselves or others. Others are committed after being found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity.

Source: Barry Meier, "Experiment of Privatized Mental Hospital Shows Benefits," New York Times, December 28, 1999.