Mental Health Courts

Several factors over the past 40 years have led to a massive increase in the number of mentally ill individuals housed in prisons and jails, including the rise of the community mental health movement, which resulted in the deinstitutionalization of thousands of mentally ill patients from state hospitals; the early successes of Thorazine, dubbed the “wonder drug” because of its ability to control psychotic behavior; and the decline of psychiatry, prompted by public exposés, such as Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which revealed the deplorable conditions of many state psychiatric hospitals of the 1960s. As a result, in a process coined the “criminalization of the mentally ill,” the criminal justice system has become the de facto mental healthcare system in the United States.

There are more persons with mental illness residing in prisons and jails today than in public psychiatric hospitals. Once incarcerated, the mentally ill offender faces higher rates of victimization, imposed isolation, and even new charges for prosecution in [Page 252]the system, mostly because of his or her inability to comprehend directives and respond with conforming behavior. The recognition that the traditional criminal justice response is inappropriate for the mentally ill offender led to the creation of mental health courts, which built upon the success of drug courts (a prior experiment with problem solving-courts). Mental health courts were created in the 1990s to divert qualified offenders from the criminal justice and correctional systems to the mental health system, with the ultimate goal of providing immediate alternatives to incarceration for people with mental illness. Therapeutic jurisprudence provides a framework for mental health courts, which can have both benefits and disadvantages as diversion programs.