When mental illness intersects with the criminal justice system

[Disir]

Amid a spate of unusual and violent killings in Montgomery County last month, authorities are investigating what they say is a common thread: mental illness.
According to Dr. Alan Newman, a psychiatrist with Georgetown University, in the past, institutionalization was “too easy.”

Now, people can only be hospitalized against their will if they are “an immediate danger” to themselves or others, he said.

“The flip side means that many people who are severely mentally ill, untreated and homeless, cannot be forced to get treatment because they do not meet this narrow definition of dangerous,” he said.

“Some of those patients will eventually commit an offense that they wouldn’t have if they had gotten treatment,” he said. Conversely, those who committed violent acts when untreated often are not a threat to the community once they’ve received the care they need, he said.

Advocates for those with mental illness say that when Congress passed legislation emphasizing de-institutionalization in 1963, the goal was community-based treatment centers. That goal never substantially materialized, Wallenstein said.

“Unfortunately we only hear about mental illness when there’s an egregious act of violence,” said Dr. Raymond Crowel, the county’s Chief of Behavioral Health and Crisis Services.

When mental illness intersects with the criminal justice system -- Gazette.Net

Inside the above link is a list of the 4 bills in Maryland.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

I'm inclined to agree that our current treatment of mental illness is putting the public in jeopardy by making forced hospitalization harder than it used to be. It's a good-bad thing, good for reducing uncalled-for hospitalizations, but bad because the requirements of 'immediate harm' to another isn't usually present until they actually hurt somebody. By which time it's too late and they're in custody anyway.

I also reject the premise that some acute mental impairments are a legal defense for certain violent crimes. If you're legally insane you're a mad dog and should be treated as such. If you're only sane and safe when on your medication, since forcing people to take it and ensuring they have is impossible unless incarcerated, instead of risking it you should either be forcibly incarcerated or executed. We don't let legally blind people drive cars, so why let violent mentally ill people walk around? Isn't their fault they're that way, and it's a shame they are, but it's not an innocent's fault either.

 

[Disir]

So, you want to kill them and recognize that it isn't their fault at the same time?

Prisons are not designed for the mentally ill. The most qualified group of people don't want them because there is no money in it.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

If someone's so out-of-control of their own limbs they murder or attack innocent bystanders then yes, they should be held respnosible along with everyone else and executed if guilty of murder. If less-than-murder, incarcerated like everyone else. Being insane shouldn't be an affirmitive defense.

 

[DGS49]

On the one hand if someone commits a violent crime they should removed from the street, and if the criminal justice system is the only workable way of doing that, then so be it.

But on the other hand, we cannot then treat everyone as though they were a fully-competent bad guy, once they are incarcerated. The focus needs to be identifying mental illness in jail and treating it as mental illness.

But paying for this enhanced treatment is problematic, eh? We are already spending too much in caging bad guys.

 

[Disir]

On the one hand if someone commits a violent crime they should removed from the street, and if the criminal justice system is the only workable way of doing that, then so be it.

But on the other hand, we cannot then treat everyone as though they were a fully-competent bad guy, once they are incarcerated. The focus needs to be identifying mental illness in jail and treating it as mental illness.

But paying for this enhanced treatment is problematic, eh? We are already spending too much in caging bad guys.

Aren't we spending more money? Some of these folks are diagnosed mentally ill and get a SSI check. They don't like the prescribed medication, are incapable of holding down jobs, live on the street, self medicate through other drugs, and then have a psychotic break or at some point become violent. We then pay for the arrest, a trip to the psych ward, the jail time, the judges time, the public defender, the prosecutor, another psych evaluation and then prison time with medication. They will be released and the whole process starts all over again. It seems to me that it would be more cost effective and the least harm to society if this was taken care of before they hit the system.