Mental health courts
Whether you’re for or against mental health courts, it’s good to know that the tragic intersection of mental illness and the criminal justice system is being attended to in some states. From California’s Mercury News:
California’s prison population is bursting with more than 170,000 inmates crammed into facilities designed for 100,000.
Recently, the Legislature passed and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a construction program to help alleviate this concern. However, this is a temporary fix. California needs to focus on prison reform instead of prison expansion.
Unfortunately, people with mental illnesses are over-represented in prisons and jails nationwide. … Effective mental health treatment is the missing element of corrections reform.
Mentally ill need treatment, not prison time
liz | 9:44 AM | Uncategorized
If drugs were decriminalized, we wouldn’t need to build more prisons and could spend our money our centers for voluntary treatment, the only kind that works. If the barriers to employment and housing for the mentally ill were reduced (okay I don’t know how), people with this label wouldn’t end up in the criminal justice system. If public defenders, instead prison builders were given tax dollars fewer poor people, innocent of the crimes of which they are accused, would be forced to plead NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity) and fake symptoms to get out of prison time they didn’t deserve in the first place. However, placing people convicted of crimes in mental institutions with no sentences and worse conditions that prisons is not a solution. (Sorry I’m on fire on this one – glad you’re back)
There have been decades of talk about a “continuum of care.” To date, the continuum appears to have found its reality in persons transitioning through an under-resourced public mental health system or falling by its wayside to an overpopulated prison system. A reasonable society would do better. A compassionate society would not tolerate it.
For the moment words largely rule – continuum of care, evidence based practices, recovery, wellness, the team approach, psychosocial rehabilitation, mental health courts, jail diversion programs, empowerment, ready access, respect, hope, person-centered services, peer support, community integration, meaningful lives, holistic care – but the deeds necessary to realize them are too rarely experienced.
“We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” Abigail Adams
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