The mental health diversion law
Earlier this summer, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law allowing judges, at their discretion, to order community mental health treatment in lieu of prosecution for people accused of crimes. Some prosecutors and radio talk show hosts went nearly berserk, claiming that murderers and rapists would now go free simply by telling some gullible judge that whatever they did was due to health problems.
It’s tempting to dismiss the criticism of the bill, AB 1810, as just another groundless rant of the type that backward-looking, tough-on-crime critics have thrown at criminal justice reforms like AB 109 realignment and Propositions 47 and 57. In this case, though, the critics have a point. Although it seems inconceivable that a judge would ever dismiss murder or rape charges just because the defendant claims mental illness, the law does, in theory, make such a thing possible. It’s a flaw that ought to be fixed.
Unfortunately, fixing it opens the door to wider efforts to entirely scrap a law that at its core is smart and badly needed. The task for lawmakers is to fine-tune the legislation that they passed and Brown signed just a few weeks ago without undermining its central purpose — the expanded diversion of mentally ill defendants from the criminal justice system — and to do it in the final weeks of the legislative session, when legislators are dealing with competing demands for their attention. It won’t be easy. But it’s important.
The legislation addresses a crisis in both mental health and criminal justice. California jails are increasingly filling up with mentally ill people who have been accused of crimes. Many are so sick they have been deemed incompetent to stand trial. So what do we do with them? Ideally, they are sent to one of the limited number of California state hospitals where they are treated until finally fit to be tried for their alleged crimes. It may sound counterintuitive, but most patients who are hospitalized actually do get better and do go to court for further proceedings.
But those state hospitals are packed. With virtually every bed full, a growing number of ISTs (the state’s lingo for accused criminals who are incompetent to stand trial) are kept in local jails, where their mental condition is far less likely to improve and they are far less likely to proceed to trial. There they sit, taking up badly needed space, neither convicted of any crime (because they haven’t gone to trial) nor free to go home (because they have been charged).
Many of those defendants are chronically homeless. Because of their mental conditions they require close (and costly) observation.