[1] Mental health courts share characteristics with crisis intervention teams, jail diversion programs, specialized probation and parole caseloads, and a host of other collaborative initiatives intended to address the significant overrepresentation of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system.
[2] In the United States in the early 1980s, Judge Evan Dee Goodman helped establish a court exclusively to deal with mental health matters at Wishard Memorial Hospital.
After, a couple years of lobbying the local authorities in Marion County, Indiana, the mental health court began as a formal program in 1996.
"I started seeing a lot of people in criminal misdemeanors who were cycling through the system and who simply did not understand their probation conditions or what they were doing in jail.
They were considered a success which met needs that would have otherwise gone unmet; however they required financial support and wider changes to the system, and it is not clear whether they will be more broadly implemented.
For example, a court may accept only defendants charged with misdemeanors, who have no history of violent crimes, and who have an Axis I diagnoses as defined by the DSM-IV.
Defendants who fit the criteria based on the initial screening are usually given a more comprehensive assessment to determine their interest in participating and their community treatment needs.
For those who adhere to their treatment plan for the agreed upon time, usually between six months and two years, their cases are either dismissed or the sentence is greatly reduced.
If the defendant does not comply with the conditions of the court, or decides to leave the program, their case returns to the original criminal calendar where the prosecution proceeds as normal.
As a rule, most mental health courts use a variety of intermediate sanctions in response to noncompliance before ending a defendant's participation.
[14] Although the judge has final say over a case, mental health courts also take a team approach in which the defense counsel, prosecutor, case managers, treatment professionals, and community supervision personnel (for example, probation) work collaboratively to, for example, craft systems of sanctions and rewards for offenders in drug treatment.
Many mental health courts also employ a full-time coordinator who manages the docket and facilitates communication between the different team members.
An evaluation of the Brooklyn Mental Health Court[15] documented improvements in several outcome measures, including substance abuse, psychiatric hospitalizations, homelessness and recidivism.
Other studies show that more involvement of mental health services, or more supervision of the individual receiving treatment, is positively correlated with higher levels of recidivism.