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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:25 pm
Time: 8:25 pm
Results for mentally ill offenders (california)
1 results foundAuthor: Davis, Ashly Nikkole Title: The Effect of Realignment on Mentally Ill Offenders Summary: With the recent Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata, "realignment" seems to be California's new criminal justice buzzword. Underlying the Court's decision in Brown, however, lay two important class action suits - Coleman v. Brown and Plata v. Brown - that served as the driving forces behind the Court's decision. These cases alleged Eighth Amendment violations in California's prison system based on deficiencies in mental health care and medical care, respectively. With the Court crediting the Constitutional violations and lack of adequate care alleged in Coleman and Plata to an oversized prison population, overcrowding emerged as the issue of the day. State legislators responded to the Court's directive to rapidly decrease California's prison population with AB 109, public safety realignment legislation geared toward ameliorating prison overcrowding. Ironically, though they were the impetus behind this legislation, the mentally ill have largely been left out of the realignment conversation. Little mention - if any - has been made of how AB 109 improves or even addresses the treatment of the mentally ill. This paper will analyze AB 109 to determine how closely it rings true to the spirit behind the Brown v. Plata litigation - namely, providing mentally ill offenders with adequate medical and psychiatric care - and what impact the bill will have on the mentally ill. More specifically, this paper will assess whether AB 109 marks yet another in a long series of failed attempts by the state to appropriately address the treatment of mentally ill individuals in state custody. One of the basic themes behind this paper is a recognition of the importance of mentally ill offenders in California, not only in terms of the litigation that sparked realignment, but also from a general corrections standpoint. Research shows that mentally ill offenders recidivate at a much higher rate than non-mentally ill offenders. Therefore, it is crucial from a public safety perspective to determine where realignment is going to place these individuals. Further, AB 109 is not the first alignment of state and local fiscal and administrative responsibility in California that implicates the treatment of the mentally ill. It is necessary to attempt to determine what effects realignment will have on California's mental health resources, which have been scarce for much of the state's history. While not the focus of this paper, underlying much of the discussion will be the disturbing, yet generally accepted fact that prisons and jails in the United States largely operate as de facto mental hospitals. In California in particular, well-intentioned efforts to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill from state hospitals have had disastrous consequences, with the result being that many mentally ill individuals have ended up in the one place that accepts almost everyone: the criminal justice system. If there is one thing that most people seem to agree on, it is that many of the state's previous attempts to address this population have been ineffective. Mentally ill offenders are likely to struggle in the correctional system, whether at the state or local level. This paper explores, but does not intend to answer important questions such as: How do you hold mentally ill offenders accountable? Is this a population that we should even be seeking to imprison? Details: Stanford, CA: Stanford Law School, Criminal Justice Center, 2012. 37p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 25, 2014 at: https://www.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/child-page/183091/doc/slspublic/Davis_AB109_And_Mentally_Ill_Offenders.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: https://www.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/child-page/183091/doc/slspublic/Davis_AB109_And_Mentally_Ill_Offenders.pdf Shelf Number: 134245 Keywords: Correctional ReformMental Health TreatmentMentally Ill Offenders (California)Prison Health CarePrison OvercrowdingPrisonersPublic Safety Realignment |