Joe was a homeless gentleman who kept being picked up for trespassing at Crown Center, where he would sleep in a box on a corner in that area. Joe was not medication compliant and had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was not engaged with any community-based behavioral health center except to go to Swope Health Services once a week to take a shower.
A Crisis Intervention Team officer came to court to let the Mental Health Court team know that he felt Joe was decompensating. Outreach at Swope made contact with Joe and after several months of working with him on an intensive level, Joe was admitted to the Mental Health Court program. He graduated and now has stable housing, is medication compliant, has a case manager and has not had police contact since August 2012.
Our staff here at Legal Aid are always looking for the root cause of our clients’ legal problems and for ways we can solve related community problems. One shining example of this work is Mental Health Court in Kansas City.
Many of the defendants in Municipal Court in Kansas City have serious mental health problems that cause them to be homeless and often lead them to violate trespassing and other laws. It used to be that these defendants were in a constant cycle of going in and out of jail, while no one paid any attention to the real cause of the problem. While their mental health problem remained untreated the likelihood of them being able to stay out of jail was remote.
Working with the judges, court administration, prosecutors, mental health providers, the superintendent of the City jail and many others, Legal Aid collaborated to create one of the first Mental Health Court’s in the country. The Court now gives offenders with serious mental health problems the opportunity to go to treatment, rather than going to jail. To graduate from Mental Health Court participants have to stay on their medications, go to regular counseling sessions and not have any new charges filed against them for at least six months. If they graduate, the original charges that brought them into Court are dropped.
The results of the project are fantastic. Today, Mental Health Court has a 56% graduation rate and 89% of the detainees who graduate commit no further violations in the year after their release. Not only does this program improve safety in Kansas City, it also improves the quality of life for the defendants—allowing them to get their mental health issues under control and lead stable lives. Legal Aid has been similarly collaborative for Veterans Treatment Court and Drug Court.
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