Progress

I found an article by Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton who was directly involved with and witnessed the effects on mental health and the legal system. Partly because of her own personal experiences, she has concerns about and advocates for keeping people suffering from mental illness out of jails and placing them in appropriate mental health treatment. She starts off by listing statistics. According the the U.S. Department of Justice, 16% of inmates reported a mental condition or previous psychiatric hospitalization. She also says that according to some studies, nearly half of the inmates had three or more previous sentences and that inmates with mental illness stay an average of three to four times longer than other inmates. The fact that inmates have had previous sentences shows the theory of the revolving door which many talk about. She says that mentally ill inmates require more resources, but taxpayers are paying for police to repeatedly arrest, transport, and process mentally ill defendants. She makes a point by saying, "The question becomes, would we rather spend these dollars to keep mentally ill citizens homeless, revolving in and out of our criminal justice system, or would we rather spend these dollars to help them to become stable, productive citizens?". Her focus for solution to this problem takes place in Ohio's criminal justice system. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) is a training program to help police officers deal with mentally ill people. In this training, they learn about diagnoses, treatment, symptoms, crisis de-escalation, etc. so that they can better deal with mentally ill and prevent violence and large coflicts. CIT is a collaboration between law enforcement and mental health community and this is what Stratton says is an important part of keeping the mentally ill out of jail. Another solution that Stratton and other advocates promote is a separate mental health court.