Mental Health Courts

Mental Health Courts

The mental state of a person is critical in determining the likelihood of deviant behavior in an individual. People with mental instability are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior. This implies that there is a higher likelihood for mentally unstable people to be incarcerated in comparison to their mentally stable counterparts. Sending a mentally sick person to jail does not help in achieving the goals of the criminal justice system; to rehabilitate criminals. This has created the need for countries to devise ways of ensuring that mentally ill people are treated and rehabilitated while serving their sentences. Countries, such as the United States, have adopted the use of mental courts in rehabilitating mentally ill offenders (Snedker, 2018). There are several reasons that have accounted for the emergence of mental courts. The leading factors are the need to reduce overcrowding in local prisons and the presence of drug courts. Often, mentally ill offenders have a history of involvement in drug abuse. The need to rehabilitate offenders in drug courts has given rise to the need for the establishment of mental health courts. Currently, there are about 170 mental courts in the United States.

Mental health courts often aim at achieving the following critical objectives. They help in preventing the incarceration of mentally unstable offenders and often focus on giving them the necessary support; thus, rehabilitation and behavior change (Johnston & Flynn, 2017). The courts help in ensuring that intervention measures are started early enough by providing that the process of screening is begun early enough and the necessary corrective actions put in place. Often screening and referrals are done within the first month of the arrest.  Mental health courts aim at ensuring that there is a conducive working environment of mental health officers and their support systems to guarantee total rehabilitation and treatment of mentally ill offenders. Treatment and rehabilitation are attained through strict supervision of patients through constant monitoring of the performance of offenders. This allows room for the necessary corrective measures to be taken to address possible deviations in the expected outcomes..

The most effective mental health courts in the United States are Broward County Mental Health Court, Brooklyn Mental Health Court, San Bernardino in California, Anchorage Court in Alaska, and King County in Washington. Various factors have led to increased effectiveness of the mental health courts listed above. The first contributing factor is the allocation of adequate resources from the government.  The availability of resources, both human and financial, is critical in determining the outcomes of mental health courts. Financial resources are used to source medicine and to higher the right workforce to attend to the patients (Castellano, 2017). The provision of well-trained personnel and resources to run the courts is a leading factor in enhancing the efficiency of mental health courts in the United States.

Cooperation of all the players in mental health courts has greatly enhanced their effectiveness. In the recent past, increased government support has been witnessed. The increase in support might be as a result of the need to decongest the local prisons and the need to lower the rate of recidivism of mentally ill patients after they are released from prison. There has been increased knowledge among the general population on mental health, thus lowering stigma initially meted the mentally ill patients. Defendants also understand that the ultimate goal of these courts is not incarceration but treatment and rehabilitation. Such knowledge makes them more compliant with the guidelines given by medical practitioners and court officials.  The political goodwill that exists in the United States has led to the establishment of more mental health courts in the different States. The existence of many courts has greatly reduced the workload in the courts, which allows them to attend to the mental health cases brought before them properly. Successfully addressing the existing cases guarantees successful treatment and rehabilitation of offenders, thus lowering the likelihood of recidivism.

There are two categories of people that are more likely to be taken to mental health courts. These are juveniles and young adults. Among the most common offenses are domestic violence, misdemeanor, drug and substance abuse, robbery, and at times felony cases (Davis & Cates, 2017). The prerequisite for someone to be charged in a mental health court is that there must be proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was in an unstable mental state at the point that an offense was committed. Also, it should be established that a person is not in the right mental state to be charged in the regular courts and make informed decisions during plea-taking and subsequent hearing of the case.

Challenges faced by mental health courts

Mental health courts yare often seen as a source of stigma for mentally ill offenders and a potential breach of patient confidentiality, which makes people less willing to be involved in mental health court proceedings. This makes defendants more willing to undergo proceedings in the conventional courts than in mental health courts. An interplay of these factors makes defendants less cooperative, which makes the process of treatment and rehabilitation harder and time-consuming. Therefore, the realization of the objectives of mental health courts in the United States becomes harder.

Mental patient cases vary from a patient to another, which makes it hard for officers to identifying a starting point. Moreover, the measures to be adopted to guarantee the stability of a patient vary from a person to another.  The variation is worsened by the fact that there is a strain on the resources allocated to handling mental health cases. This is because the needs of mentally ill defendants range from medicine to housing for most of the cases.

Unavailability and inefficiency of treatment. Due to the diversities in mental health cases, it is difficult to treat mental health cases. The existence of diverse cases and few professionals make some cases are less responsive to treatments administered due to lack of enough attention.  In some cases, treatment does not help in reducing the likelihood of a patient being involved in deviant behavior after treatment. In contrast, in other cases, treatment is inexistent for orders that keep recurring. Such factors reduce the efficiency of mental health cases in the treatment and rehabilitation of mentally ill offenders.

Some patients fail the required level of legal competency necessary for criminal proceedings to take place. For a legal case to commence, the defendant must be in a position to understand the legal implications of their actions right before taking their plea. This condition often fails to hold in mental health cases as patients are unable to make sober decisions such as those relating to treatment. This leads to a wastage of time since mental health courts are often forced to delay plea-taking to give room for patients to receive treatment to boost their state of mental stability.

Practitioners in mental health courts are in a dilemma on when it is appropriate for incarceration to be used as a means for offender rehabilitation as it is in other courts such as drug courts. Such instances are when offenders violate the laid down sanctions, such as taking appropriate medication (Johnston & Flynn, 2017). This stalemate can be accounted for by the fact that failure to take medicine is a violation of a court order but not necessarily a violation of the law, thus not a sufficient condition for incarceration. Additionally, the effectiveness of incarceration has been questioned since past studies have indicated that sending mentally ill patients to jail often worsens their state. The use of prison as a deterrence mechanism for potential offenders does not work for the mentally ill since most patients feel like jail is a relief from the constant stigmatization from the community.

Some people view mental health courts as a violation of the right to trial by jury before any corrective action is taken. Critics have argued that taking offenders through treatment and rehabilitation before they are tried in a court of law is a violation of the most basic human rights. This makes these courts to be less popular, which explains the little support witnessed amongst people. This opinion seems to overlook the fact that some of the mentally ill patients are not in the right mental state to take a plea in the conventional courts.

References

Castellano, U. (2017). The politics of benchcraft: the role of judges in mental health courts. Law & Social Inquiry, 42(2), 398-422.

Davis, T. O., & Cates, K. A. (2017). Mental Health Counseling and Specialty Courts. Professional Counselor, 7(3), 251-258.

Johnston, E. L., & Flynn, C. P. (2017). Mental Health Courts and Sentencing Disparities. Vill. L. Rev., 62, 685.

Snedker, K. A. (2018). Mental Health Courts as the “New Generation” of Problem-Solving Courts. In Therapeutic Justice (pp. 1-27). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.