Abstract
Mental health courts (MHCs) represent an important new development at the interface of the criminal justice and mental health systems. MHCs are criminal courts for persons with mental illness that were in part created to divert this population from jail/prison into community treatment. MHCs are proliferating rapidly despite limited knowledge regarding their characteristics or their efficacy. We surveyed the entire population of adult MHCs in the United States, n=90. In the past 8 years, MHCs have been created in 34 states, with an aggregate current caseload of 7,560 clients in MHCs nationally. Most courts (92%) reported using jail as a sanction for noncompliance, if only rarely. Further, jail sanction use was significantly predicted by increased judicial supervision and number of felons in the court. Implications for MHCs and social monitoring are discussed.
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Notes
Judicial supervision (lower scores indicate more frequent supervision) and community supervision (higher scores indicate more forms of supervision) were significantly correlated, r=−.23, p=.03. Thus, it is possible, in the regression predicting jail sanction use, the two forms of supervision did not provide unique variance.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the National Institute of Justice (Grant #2003-DD-BX-1012) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We are grateful to Aubrey Spaulding and Margaret Eck-Raider for their help with data collection.
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Redlich, A.D., Steadman, H.J., Monahan, J. et al. Patterns of Practice in Mental Health Courts: A National Survey. Law Hum Behav 30, 347–362 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9036-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9036-x