Youngstown News, Mental health courts: A good idea then and even better now
"Ohio Supreme Court Justice Eve- lyn Lundberg Stratton and Attorney General Mike DeWine are once again collaborating in the important work of breaking a pattern that too often ends with mentally ill people facing criminal charges and ending up in jail or prison.
Nearly a decade ago, Justice Stratton was working her way around the state touting federal legislation that had been authored by then-U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, D-6th, that encouraged development of mental health courts. At the time, we urged Mahoning County to pursue establishment of one, and it did so.
Today, Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Maureen A. Sweeney presides over the court, which is one of 37 in the state. The court works with mental health agencies in the county to provide a better, cheaper and more just alternative than jail for nonviolent offenders who are battling mental health issues.
The movement toward recognizing the need for intervention and an alternative to incarceration followed the deinstitutionalization movement and the closing of state mental health facilities decades ago. The motives of that movement may have been pure and even necessary in an age when too many people were too easily confined to institutions. But the effect was also to put many people on the streets who still had mental health issues and who were, for a variety of reasons, not receiving treatment or medication.
And in that environment, those people ended up arrested, in court and, often, in prison. Back in 2000, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said it was housing 6,393 mentally ill inmates, 3,051 of whom were classified as severely mentally disabled. Five years later, mentally ill inmates were still an enormous burden on the Department of Corrections, with $64 million spent in 2006 on mental health care for inmates — more than was spent on food for all inmates."
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