When Broward County Florida mental health-criminal justice community stakeholders reached consensus to implement a specialized mental health court to problem solve and combat the criminalization of persons with mental illness in our county in 1997, I was tapped based on my disability law and civil rights background working for persons with mental illness and disabilities. We did not know this type of court had not been done before, nor did we care.
Our social justice mission was simple -- to do something. Broward's mental health court had no funding, grants or budget. Yet our community had passion and a shared vision that justice demanded a stop-gap fix that would use the court process to integrate existing resources and be accountable to court participants, if they wanted the help. The concept that a judge working in tandem with lawyers and our community could break the dehumanizing cycling in and out of jail, hospitals and the streets was our something. Through the application of Therapeutic Justice (TJ), a court was converted to a place of refuge.
[For more of this story, written by Ginger Lerner-Wren, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...tand-_b_5860358.html]
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