By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s courts are tired of dealing with criminal defendants who are mentally ill but not criminally insane. State government has a place for the latter sort of criminals: Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown. But they are a small subset of the mentally ill, criminals so sick that they are not responsible for themselves.
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Most criminal defendants who are mentally ill and convicted of serious crimes end up in Connecticut’s prison system — which may be even more tired of dealing with the mentally ill than the courts are. The prisons are full of people from what the politically incorrect past properly called broken homes, people whose upbringing was miserable, who didn’t get a decent education and entered adulthood fit only for menial work, people to whom crime and drug abuse seemed the most practical way of life, and people with learning disabilities.
The prison system does what it can with those people but it’s not terribly effective, since most released prisoners return to crime and are back in prison within a few years even as many released prisoners also return to crime but aren’t caught.
Connecticut’s courts strive to avoid putting people in prison, knowing how prison can damage and handicap troublesome people even more. But the state is full of repeat offenders who should have been locked up permanently after multiple convictions, and at some point the public simply has to be protected. The public is not as protected against repeat offenders as it should be, but prison is expensive and most legislators and governors have preferred to have the public pay for repeat offenders by enduring more crimes than pay with taxes for imprisoning more criminals.
So since the governor and General Assembly seem indifferent to the mental illness problem faced by the courts and prisons, the Judicial Department has bravely undertaken to try to do something about it on its own.
This month Chief Justice Raheem L. Mullins announced a committee to plan the creation of an experimental “behavior health court” to be based in New Haven and potentially expanded statewide.
The committee will include judges, police officials, medical and addiction experts, educators, and people who have gone through mental illness and addiction themselves. One of the judges, Dan Klau, lost a daughter to drug addiction and mental illness, and not for lack of trying to help her. Indeed, nearly everyone knows someone who is mentally ill or addicted; the problem is getting worse in Connecticut even as state government, in its relentless pursuit of tax revenue, increasingly facilitates drug and gambling addiction.
Mentally ill or addicted people “might initially come to court for minor incidents,” the chief justice says. “However, without proper intervention, their conduct can spiral out of control, especially if they choose to self-medicate with alcohol or illegal drugs. Our goal is to triage these individuals and get them help before they inflict irreparable harm on themselves or someone else.”
The chief justice hasn’t defined a particular format for the behavioral health court, leaving that to the committee. Getting people “the help they need” is a cliché that needs definition too.
There are many other questions. Judges already have great discretion in sentencing and can condition sentences and probations on a defendant’s cooperation with various treatments, but how well do they work? If judges made enough use of their discretion in sentencing the mentally ill and addicted, and if enough treatment was available and worked, would a behavioral health court be needed?
Would a behavioral health court be just another mechanism of what state law euphemizes as “accelerated rehabilitation,” the gradual erasure of a defendant’s responsibility, and the release of more repeat offenders? Who would audit the results of the court to prevent it from becoming such a mechanism? How much would the court cost, and, if it worked, how much might it save?
They committee should answer these questions. In any case it aims to confront a longstanding disaster the rest of state government has been happy to overlook.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
” Connecticut’s proposal belongs to a well-established family of “problem-solving courts,” generally called mental-health courts, behavioral-health courts, or therapeutic courts. Connecticut may be proposing a somewhat broader version because “behavioral health” ordinarily includes both mental illness and substance-use disorders—particularly people with both conditions.
“The Connecticut committee has not yet settled such matters as eligibility, whether participation occurs before or after a plea, and what happens after successful completion. The announced concept—an interdisciplinary team connecting defendants with treatment while a judge monitors progress—is nevertheless quite familiar elsewhere. Close American precedents
“Broward County, Florida is generally credited with establishing the first modern criminal mental-health court in 1997. Its misdemeanor court is a voluntary, pretrial-diversion program for nonviolent defendants with mental illness or developmental disabilities. Treatment may replace ordinary prosecution, subject to continued court supervision.
“New York may provide Connecticut’s most useful statewide example. New York authorizes “Mental Health Parts” at both superior- and local-court levels. Its courts link defendants whose illness contributed to their criminal involvement with court-supervised community treatment. Participation is supposed to be voluntary and based on informed choice, and local courts can tailor their eligibility rules, plea requirements and consequences for successful completion.
“Michigan has gone further toward making mental-health courts part of a statewide system. It has state-certified adult and juvenile mental-health courts in numerous counties, with statewide standards and an official certification process. That is a useful model for Connecticut’s stated possibility of expanding beyond the New Haven pilot.
“Washington State distinguishes between two related models. Mental-health courts serve defendants whose serious mental illness contributed to their criminal involvement, while broader community courts address behavioral health, housing and other circumstances contributing to repeated minor offenses. Connecticut’s terminology suggests that it may eventually borrow from both approaches. Similar courts in other countries
“Ontario, Canada, operates specialized Mental Health Courts within its ordinary criminal courts. They commonly have a dedicated judge, prosecutor and defense counsel, together with community-agency workers who arrange psychiatric assessments, mental-health and substance-use treatment, housing assistance and practical support. This is quite close to what Connecticut appears to envision.
“British Columbia uses “integrated courts” in Victoria, Vancouver and Kelowna. These courts handle defendants experiencing combinations of mental illness, addiction, cognitive impairment and homelessness. Health, housing, probation and court personnel work together around bail, sentencing and supervision. Because they expressly address co-occurring addiction and social instability, these may be among the closest international analogues to a broadly conceived behavioral-health court.
“Victoria, Australia, has the Assessment and Referral Court, known as ARC. It is a therapeutic criminal-court program for accused people with complex mental illness or cognitive impairment. Participants are assessed by a court case manager and receive coordinated treatment and support while the court reviews their progress. ARC began as a limited experiment and has subsequently expanded to additional court locations—another potentially useful precedent for Connecticut.
“One nomenclature trap is worth noting: Queensland, Australia, also has something called a “Mental Health Court,” but it is not the Connecticut model. It is a specialized forensic court, constituted by Supreme Court judges and clinicians, that decides questions such as criminal responsibility and fitness for trial and may issue forensic treatment orders. What may distinguish Connecticut
“The basic court structure is therefore not experimental in the sense of being untried. The genuinely unsettled questions are likely to be:
“The New York statewide network, Ontario’s mental-health courts, and British Columbia’s integrated courts would probably be the most informative models for the Connecticut committee. Florida provides the historical starting point, while Victoria demonstrates how a pilot can be expanded geographically.”
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