In most states, mentally ill people deemed incompetent to stand trial are transferred to a state hospital, where they are given limited treatment that may include medication and therapy.
But demand for such treatment services now exceeds the capacity to deliver them, as scores of state mental institutions have closed since the 1970s and the number of mentally ill people in the criminal-justice system has risen, reports WSJ’s Joe Palazzolo:
In many states, defendants charged with misdemeanors and low-level felonies who show signs of mental illness can spend months in jail awaiting evaluations or bed space at hospitals, say mental-health experts and judges.
Often, they say, the competency system seems self-defeating. After mentally ill patients are restored to competency, “they come back to court, and the crimes for which they were charged have penalties that were far less than or equal to the time they served [awaiting a spot in a mental hospital], and then they are released,” said Fred Osher, a psychiatrist who directs health programs at the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
In a 2014 report of 42 states and the District of Columbia, 90% of the states reported that demand for defendant mental-health services had risen in recent years.
W. Lawrence Fitch, a law professor at University of Maryland who wrote the report for the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, attributed the increase in part to lawyers and courts improperly substituting competency services to treat mentally ill people already incarcerated.
“It’s sort of a misuse of the competency system to address larger problems,” Mr. Fitch said.
Mentally ill people have successfully challenged wait times in Louisiana and Oregon in recent years. In California, public defenders in at least four counties are challenging long wait periods, according to a deputy public defender in Contra Costa County.
California health officials say the average wait time for a hospital bed statewide is about 41 days. The number of patients waiting for competency services in California hospitals jumped to 426 in December 2014 from 168 in December 2012.
A spokesman for the California Department of State Hospitals said the state has tried to improve wait times by creating jail-based restoration programs in two counties and adding beds to hospitals.
[For more of this story, written by Jacob Gershman, go to http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/...nts/?KEYWORDS=mental]
Comments (0)