The Brooklyn Mental Health Court, handles both misdemeanor and felony cases in Brooklyn. The goal is to link participants with serious and persistent mental illness to long-term treatment in lieu of incarceration. Research suggests that the court has succeeded in reducing criminal behavior and hospitalizations among participants. Click here for a podcast with presiding judge Matthew D'Emic.

Judge Stephanie Rhoades has presided over the Anchorage Mental Health Court—the first mental health court in Alaska—since it was created in 1998. In May 2006 she spoke with Center for Court Innovation about the court.

Q: Overall, what would you say is most positive about mental health courts? What’s working?
So many of the individuals who end up recycling through the criminal justice system are disenfranchised. These folks are people who have lost all their natural supports. They don’t have advocates any longer, they don’t have family members to take them in, and they’ve burnt all their bridges with treatment and everyone else. They’re the tough customers, and their lifestyles are really dissonant with the medical model of mental health and substance abuse treatment delivery. So I think that the resource of a boundary-spanner and a linker, the case coordinator who can actually take the individual and hook them up with services appropriate to their condition is a tremendous resource. And what I’ve found is that the treatment system is far more likely to serve an individual who’s being monitored in the mental health court.

The outcome of all this is that people do engage in services, and then when they have their next mental health crisis, instead of defaulting to the police on the street they default to the treatment system. They know that they can resort to them in crisis and not be turned away.
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