(Nov. 18, 2016) The award winning Boston Globe Spotlight Team called into question the ability of front-line officials who manage Massachusetts criminal justice system to effectively operate the state’s mental health courts. In its latest series, The Desperate and the Dead: Courts, the Spotlight Team noted the failure of the Massachusetts mental health system to pursue and establish mental health courts, saying the “state lags badly in its services and solicitude for defendants with mental illness.” (Boston Globe. The Desperate and the Dead: Courts, Nov 12).
There are few alternatives to criminal courts for individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) in Massachusetts. The bulk of the $18 million a year the state spends on mental health funding is spent on juvenile cases and the worst cases of SMI, leaving little else for the larger group adult defendants with mental illness. This means the majority of those defendants are going to jail rather than treatment facilities. It also means that many defendants end up in drug diversion court instead by default, where their success depends on not using illegal drugs.
Further, courts aren’t required to keep track of mentally ill defendants in a system that sees some 200,000 criminal cases per year. The numbers are staggering: At least 30% of defendants the court system sees have a serious mental illness. And the Spotlight Team reports that 10 – 40% of inmates in jail are on medication for mental health conditions.
The lack of mental health courts and appropriate training, combined with the state’s inability to move these defendants to suitable treatment, has led to dire consequences for an already burdened system. In Massachusetts, from 2005 through 2015, at least 17 parents and at least 18 sons and daughters with signs of mental illness, allegedly killed their children and parents. During this same period, 10% of all homicides and at least 139 people violently died by the hands of a person diagnosed with a history of mental illness.
“The criminal justice system is the system that takes over when all other systems have failed,” Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conly told the Globe, “We’re the last resort, and we’re left to pick up the pieces,” in a system that is woefully unprepared and ill equipped to handle the needs of the mentally ill.
Despite research showing a decrease in recidivism for offenders and overall better outcomes for the mentally ill, the benefits of treatment over incarceration are not being pursued in Massachusetts.
The Treatment Advocacy Center, in a nationwide review of each state’s treatment of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system, ranked Massachusetts 39th overall in providing access to mental health courts.
Massachusetts received a failing grade for its efforts to divert people with serious mental illness out of jails and into treatment. The Treatment Advocacy Center’s campaign, A Bed Instead, spotlights these failures at the state level to provide psychiatric treatment hospital beds in place of prison cells.
Learn where your state stands on mental health courts.