"Lack of follow-up care is largely responsible for the high recidivism rate among mentally ill prisoners."
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From the reports of advocacy groups such as HRW and the findings of President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Health, the question has arisen as to how best to fix the system. In the last two decades, the main means of securing compensation and effecting change for mentally ill offenders has been litigation. While such legal action has led to some reform and improvement of specific facilities, litigation is costly, time-consuming, and works only on the local level. Given the shortcomings of litigation, by 2002, it became clear to mental health groups and Congress members alike that federal legislation was the best way to fix the system.
With an eye towards effecting global change, the Senate passed the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act in 2003. Introduced by Republican Mike Dewine of Ohio, the bill received bipartisan sponsorship. As passed in the Senate, the act authorized Congress to appropriate $100 million in grants, for fiscal years 2004 and 2005, to be allocated by the Attorney General to agencies serving mentally ill offenders. The act focused on three main components, all intended to improve the treatment of mentally unstable offenders and to decrease their recidivism rates.
First, at the adjudicatory level, the act provided funding for existing and new mental health courts and other prison diversion programs for nonviolent offenders. As an alternative to the traditional courts of the criminal justice system, mental health courts foster collaboration between the criminal justice and mental health systems, seeking to divert nonviolent offenders from prisons to treatment facilities. These courts have proven successful in pilot programs in some parts of the country.
Second, at the prison treatment level, the act authorized funds to “train criminal justice personnel about mental illness…and mental health treatment personnel about criminal offenders with mental illness and the appropriate response to such offenders in the criminal justice system.” Proponents of the act argue that training these two groups will remedy many of the problems of mentally ill offender identification and treatment.
Finally, the act sought to improve the oversight, funding, and overall functioning of the mental health system by increasing collaboration “among municipal, county, and State elected officials with respect to mentally ill offenders.” In sum, the three main prongs of the Senate’s 2003 version of the act were prison diversion, education of personnel, and increased interagency and intergovernmental communication.
Kyan Safavi is a freshman in Berkeley College.